Corporate legal departments carved out bigger slices of their budgets to pay for outside counsel last year as in-house leaders grew increasingly concerned about exposure to an array of litigation risks, according to a new report. 

More than 250 general counsel and in-house litigators in the U.S. participated in Norton Rose Fulbright’s 17th annual litigation trends survey, which showed that respondents had devoted  73% of their litigation spend to outside counsel in 2021, compared with 66% in 2020.