In-house legal ping-pong

Have you ever observed submitting a request for legal support with an in-house legal team? It typically starts with someone forwarding a contract draft to legal@mycompany.com with a note, “Please review this asap”. Through time, companies introduce a form to fill in, with questions like “Why should we sign this?” and “What is the business goal?” which are often answered without conveying any meaningful information, such as “It’s a good deal, and we need to hurry”.

On the other side, someone on the legal in-house team diligently monitors the legal mailbox or reviews the submitted forms. They do their best to manage the influx of legal matters from different sources and parties and allocate them to the most competent lawyer.

However, due to the limited information in the original request, they must respond with a series of questions to understand the situation first. This back-and-forth process, often likened to a game of ping-pong, can be frustrating for legal and non-legal teams. The time it takes to gather all the necessary details and understand how to proceed can be significant, leaving everyone involved feeling the strain of inefficiency.

This problem is not isolated to a few companies but is a widespread issue affecting many in-house legal teams. Even the teams themselves are acutely aware of it. 90% of legal staff report feeling they slow down other company’s functions. On average, it takes 32% longer to close a deal with a customer due to the involvement of legal.

Triage is often an underlying source of the problem.

In-house legal teams often struggle to allocate the requests for support efficiently. You can’t blame them. They are flooded with diverse matters, and allocating them correctly is challenging. Requests can be easy or complex, urgent or non-urgent, high or low value, repetitive or unique, and they relate to various fields of law. For every request, a responsible layer must understand the factual background, the legal grounds, the business goal and commercial challenges.

Without optimal triage, matters are not allocated to the correct lawyer, and much time is wasted with back-and-forth discussions with the allocated lawyer and the user to collect all the relevant information and deal with the matter.

How to build a perfect triage system?

Organisations are different, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Your triage system should adjust to the organisation’s needs. However, some tips are generally helpful.

Offer a standardised and easy way to request legal support.

Users, typically various company employees, need a standardised and intuitive way to request legal support, which naturally fits into their operational flow. That means there should be a single entry point for all legal requests, so they do not need to research which lawyer on the in-house team is the competent (and available) one. It should also be user-friendly. Filling in a form with eighteen questions is not user-friendly and productive. Users should be encouraged to provide all the relevant data and circumstances so that the lawyers can get a whole relevant picture of the matter.

Allocate matters to the most suitable lawyer.

By implementing a triage process, you can ensure that the right people do the right work. Triage should classify matter requests according to various criteria, such as urgency, importance, complexity, risk, value, legal field, and repetitiveness, and allocate them to the most suitable in-house lawyer. Ideally, competence should not be the only criterion for the choice of the lawyer, but their availability to deliver quickly as well. This can improve the utilization of in-house lawyers and enhance the quality and timeliness of the legal work.

Collect and manage data.

Collecting and organising data related to each matter is fundamental to assigning the matter to the most suitable lawyer. If the data is concise and complete, the responsible lawyer will require less time to provide a solution and can consider all the relevant information without missing any of it. Triage can also incorporate a system to analyse the requests and store solutions, leading to better content recycling in case similar or identical requests reappear.

Analytics to manage your resources better

By implementing a triage process, you can manage your legal team effectively. You will be able to understand which tasks burden your legal team the most and which legal fields require more or less capacity. This can enable you to make informed and data-driven decisions regarding team management and hiring in-house lawyers.

Software to the rescue

Implementing software to help triage legal matters in a company can be helpful. However, it is a fallacy that just implementing a software solution would solve the problem. Most software solutions are digitised forms to fill in, and they do not significantly improve the user experience. Applications also force users to fit their requests in boxes and adjust how the software is designed. This is fine if a particular application fits your organisation well. But nowadays, organisations are fluid structures where workflows must be adjusted often.

In-house or out-house?

The debate of whether you should have a team of in-house lawyers or outsource can be endless. The answer is most likely - both. Even concerning smaller, potentially growing companies, it is beneficial to have at least one lawyer, a general counsel, on board. GC is there daily, observing the company's activities and thinking about compliance, risks and practical legal solutions to commercial challenges. GC will either create deliverables and solutions himself/herself or engage external lawyers. Experience also shows that external lawyers perform much better if a general counsel is involved on the company side rather than just with c-level executives.

Organisations most often wish to do recurring legal work in-house. It is faster and more economical. One-off, high-complexity, and high-risk matters are typically outsourced.