It’s been a challenging couple of years for the legal industry. And although it’s always hard to say precisely what’s going to happen next, there are certainly some trends to consider. The latest update from Robert Half Legal’s annual Future Law Office research series, “Client Dynamics Driving Change in the Legal Profession,” indicates that both in-house legal departments and law firms are looking to the next few years with a desire to work more efficiently, and are rethinking their organizing principles in order to do so.
The report explains that the legal department is becoming more closely aligned with business operations at many companies. And that means, in a lot of cases, general counsel and their colleagues are taking more control over how legal work gets done and who is doing it. This may lead to consolidating the number of firms a company uses, according to data from the report, which looked at law firm use by 175 large corporations in U.S. and Canada. Currently, the average number of firms retained is five.
