Building an effective in-house legal function requires more than deciding how many lawyers to employ.
This article explores how legal leaders can structure teams around organisational strategy, assess skills and resource gaps, delegate and automate routine work, develop people and plan for future needs. It also considers how to make the best use of limited resources while creating an agile legal function that can adapt as the business changes.
Key takeaways
- Legal team structures should reflect the organisation’s strategy, risks, culture and future needs.
- Assessing skills, workloads and resource gaps can help legal leaders make better decisions about team structure.
- Routine work can often be delegated, standardised or supported by technology to free up capacity for higher-value work.
- Continuous development and broader skills help legal teams remain agile as business needs change.
- AI and legal technology are creating new opportunities for efficiency while increasing the need for appropriate oversight, judgement and skills.
People are the most important and valuable resource to an in-house legal function.
That’s why it’s vital to structure your team to ensure you provide the right expertise across your organisation and, at the same time, give individuals opportunities to develop and progress in their careers.
Putting people first in your legal team
Because no two organisations are the same, no two legal departments are, either. The best in-house legal teams are those structured around the objectives and culture of their organisations and the legal frameworks that governs their sector.
So, a good first step in building your team is to define its purpose in strategic terms. What direction is the organisation pulling in and how can legal help?
Next, ask yourself if the team, as currently structured, is equipped to play the role you’ve identified.
Create a heat map of the legal and regulatory risks the organisation faces now and over the organisation’s current strategic and business-planning horizons. Assess how effectively your team can minimise or mitigate those risks and whether its skills and resources are aligned with what the organisation is likely to need.
Another exercise is to ask yourself how the organisation would manage its risk profile if the legal team didn’t exist. Could others in the organisation or external counsel do an effective job?
Remember that lawyers, even internal ones, are expensive and so are unlikely to be the most efficient way to meet a reoccurring or repeat need. When repeated actions follow the "rule of 3 - same thing, same way, for the same person for the third time", it suggests that that a process is emerging and that "safe empowerment" to that person or to a tool might be a good idea.
The answers to these questions will help you decide whether you need to expand, downsize or reshape your legal department.
Designing and shaping the legal function
Once you understand the purpose of your legal team and the value it adds in the organisation, design a team structure where individual roles optimise overall performance.
There is no single ideal span of control for a legal team. The appropriate number of direct reports will depend on factors including team size, seniority, specialism, complexity, geographical spread and the level of support and supervision required. As a general guide, legal teams may operate effectively with around four to six direct reports per manager, but these figures should be treated as a starting point rather than a fixed rule.
If you manage a large legal department, consider a structure where teams of lawyers support specific business units ("business partnering"). This allows the lawyers to get a deep understanding of their internal clients and provide the best possible legal service.
Look too for opportunities for dotted line management responsibility. For example, you could give a senior manager of a business unit shared responsibility over a lawyer assigned to it. The lawyer will feel part of the business unit, yet responsibility for their performance and development will remain within your remit.
Even smaller legal teams, or those with legal topic subject matter experts, will need to offer organisation-wide support. Again, aim to tailor this to the business units, even if it can’t be wholly dedicated. Remember, your role as a leader is to get the right legal support to the right people at the right time.
An important aim in this support is to be able to meet the mantra:
"One team, one consistent answer, correctly based on current law, consistent with company policies and values, expressed to the right people in the business in language that they can understand, see the reason, for and accept and which they are able to and will act upon in the way that you intend".
Analyse roles at an individual level
Get to know what everyone does - you may learn about all sorts of things going on at the coalface that you weren’t aware of. List the tasks your team members are performing and ensure their job descriptions are still relevant. Check they are still doing what the business really needs in the best way rather than just habit formed tasks or things that suit them.
Assess the costs of your team in terms of salaries, travel and external counsel and ask yourself if every lawyer is efficient and effective at using their skills and experience to add value and justify their cost. The more expensive the lawyer, the more complex or higher profile work they should be doing.
Each lawyer in a legal team should look for opportunities to delegate, standardise or automate routine work as it becomes more predictable. This can free up capacity for more complex and higher-value work, while also creating development opportunities for more junior team members.
Artificial intelligence is also changing how legal teams can approach routine and repeatable work. As AI and other legal technology tools become more capable, legal leaders should consider which activities can be supported or automated safely, while retaining appropriate human oversight and professional judgement. This also creates a need for teams to develop the skills to evaluate AI outputs, understand its limitations and use technology responsibly.
Armed now with your information on roles and costs, compare what you have with what you need. In other words, conduct a "gap (needs to be done but is not being), NAP (it is being done but is Not Adequately Performed) and Overlap (more people are doing this than should be and/or they are doing it inconsistently)" analysis.
Map your team into a family tree. Experiment with structures and think creatively, particularly if you have a skills shortage. The chances are you’ll need to present a robust case for additional resource, so explore every option before requesting approval to recruit.
Effective ways to maximise limited resource include:
- Freeing up your team by getting other parts of the business to perform routine, non-specialist tasks. This could simply mean clarifying ownership or engaging legal resource only at a leadership level;
- Investing in legal training to "safely empower" business units to self-manage work with reduced involvement of your legal team;
- Engaging with flexible external counsel or law firm secondees to meet temporary shortages caused by major bids or projects; and
- Seeking opportunities for others in the business to join your team. This could be on an internal secondment basis or as a permanent move for career development, saving recruitment time and costs.
Making your legal structure last longer
An enduring legal function must have an eye on the future as well as the present. Change is inevitable in most businesses, so a function that will attract and retain the best talent will thrive in the long as well as the medium term.
The foundation of this is the skills of your lawyers. Develop these continually to meet the current and future needs of your organisation. Aim to have all-round generalist skills as well as the expertise to meet your organisation’s specific legal or regulatory obligations.
A good commercial lawyer is better placed in a dynamic and changing business than a more specialist lawyer. Having good all-rounders also makes it easier to promote internally or create development opportunities across the organisation.
This in turn keeps people motivated and focused on a career path. And crucially, a team structure with high-quality generalist skills is agile and well-placed to serve a dynamic organisation.
Build broader skills, such as emotional intelligence, into personal development plans. Personality and behavioural tools can also help team members reflect on their working preferences, communication styles and how they interact with colleagues. Used appropriately, these tools can support development and team discussions, but should complement rather than determine decisions about recruitment, performance or progression.
Legal team structures are generally pretty flat. The best long-term options for individual lawyers, for their teams and the businesses may often lie in those individuals working hard in the team to deliver team needs and personal development goals before moving on to a new role in the team, in the wider business or in another business.
Ideally this happens in a planned way with a mutually agreed approach where an individual leaves on good terms, when then they have exhausted the value that they can get from the from the role, and the business has exhausted the value that it can get from the individual.
Rather than assuming that every career path will follow a fixed timeframe, managers should have regular conversations with team members about their development, future aspirations and the opportunities available within the team and wider organisation. These discussions can form part of ongoing development and succession planning and help both the individual and the organisation prepare for future changes.
Seven tips for leading a legal team
With your legal function in place, follow these seven tips for successful leadership:
- Set the tone by basing your team’s culture on core values.
Review team and individual performance against these values; - Spend quality time with the team and individual members.
The trust and leadership you provide will be one of the biggest reasons for their loyalty; - Give everyone a personal development plan and a career path to aspire to;
- Keep the team well informed about the organisation by passing on relevant and useful information from the board and senior management;
- Embrace flexible working;
- Celebrate and share successes.
Your team's wins are not just about playing a role in big projects and deals. Show also where your astute negotiation has saved the organisation money or where you’ve trained business units to avoid pitfalls. Perhaps you have used wider business acumen to help the business on a non-legal issue and raised the credibility of the legal team in the process; and - Use technology to continually improve efficiency and communication, especially if your team is spread across multiple locations or jurisdictions.
Finally, aim to make your team respected across the organisation for the quality of its service and the depth of its relationships. Encourage collaboration with other teams, both formally and informally.
Conclusion
Like any structure with longevity, an organisation’s in-house legal function needs firm foundations such as a relevant structure and quality people.
Create the structure by getting to know the organisation’s strategy, risks and risk appetite. From here, consider the skills you have and identify any gaps in your current setup. If you have a shortage, consider all options such as broadening your team's skills, hiring secondees or training business units to self-manage routine legal work.
Over the long term, focus on skills, training and development so your lawyers become skilled all-rounders with a deep understanding of the organisation – and enhanced career prospects.
The following commentary was provided by Anthony Inglese.
This article contains much solid advice, right from the excellent second paragraph which makes the "people development case" for properly structuring your legal team. A team which does no more than structure itself around the performance of tasks (rather than also the development of people) jeopardises its future.
I couldn't agree more with the article's focus on developing the skills of lawyers and not just their knowledge. The key sentence in the article is "And crucially, a team structure with high quality generalist skill is agile and well-placed to serve a dynamic organisation." Every organisation goes through change, some of it radical. The in-house legal team needs to look for the opportunities offered by change and be agile in meeting them.
Towards the bottom of the first page there is guidance on spans and layers. Having led legal departments of some hundreds, which had to take the question of structure seriously, I would counsel against being overly dogmatic because there can be so many variables in terms of job weights, seniority of members, team sizes etc. but in the biggest legal departments I have led there were not more than five layers of lawyers (including mine) and in the smaller ones only three.
This article gives a rough maximum number for a span, which I wouldn’t disagree with, although I have led departments with structures accommodating spans slightly above those numbers. At the other end of the spectrum my strong experience has been that there must also be a minimum number of at least three for a span to be viable. To have someone managing one or even two people is not practical.
Talk of spans and layers is only part of the issue. A related question is "Where does the work get done?" Is the work pushed down to the lowest sensible level (with supervision from above) or sucked up to the highest level? You can probably tell from my language that I prefer the former as more empowering and developmental. It is only after the issue is resolved that one can address the issue of spans and layers.
A point which could be developed further is that the article speaks of "people" but really goes on to focus only on lawyers. Many legal teams contain people who are not lawyers – it's irritating to use "them and us" language and to call them "non lawyers" – and it is important that they also benefit from people development policies.
To read Anthony's viewpoint on this article click here