Even before the COVID-19 pandemic sent tidal waves of business disruptions flooding across industries, automation had emerged as one of the great life rafts of corporate legal departments looking to cut spend by insourcing processes such as e-discovery. But the growth in the volume of work continues to outpace in-house hiring. And more automated processes likely won’t be able to prevent a reversal of the move towards corporate legal insourcing that began with the 2007 financial crisis. 

“We think the trend is already broken,” said Cornelius Grossmann, co-leader of EY Global Law.