“I just want a lawyer when I need a lawyer,” said a CEO, who was interviewing a candidate for General Counsel. In only a few words, this statement goes a long way to explain why the law department is one of the last business units to adopt digital in a meaningful way. It’s indicative of how some CEOs still see Legal as transactional—not transformational. We talk about how GCs need to adopt a more business-minded posture to propel digital initiatives. However, the onus is also on the C-Suite to view GCs as more than lawyers at their beck and call, but as agents of business acceleration and profit generation. CEOs pay a hefty price when they have legal staff respond to “what is” instead of imagining “what if.” Let’s do the math.
Global Fortune 500 revenue in 2020 was $33.3 trillion. At current benchmarks of legal spend as a percentage of revenue (just under 1%), that means that every year the Global Fortune 500 enterprises spend in the realm of $320 billion on legal departments. Research shows that digitally transforming the legal department can conservatively reduce costs by 15-20% (that is more than $60 billion of value to return annually); and when combined with the opportunity for gains in the categories of performance/quality enhancement, revenue augmentation, risk reduction, and digital business synergy, the total value capture impact significantly outpaces a pure function of legal spend. At current P/E ratios, that could well exceed $1 trillion of equity value.
X Marks the Spot: 4 Areas of Opportunity to Facilitate Free Cash Flow
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