Convincing business leaders to approve proposed budgets for legal departments can be one of the harder tasks of a GC. LACCA’s legal spend survey shows that while most GCs are happy with the budget they receive, there is still room for improvement. The region’s in-house community shares their tried-and-tested methods for securing the budgets they want and improving the legal budget process within their companies.
LACCA’s latest research into in-house teams’ legal spend shows companies prefer not to pay firms by the hour, but still have to use this fee structure for a significant proportion of the work they hire external counsel for. Against a backdrop of heightened widespread financial uncertainty, how can in-house teams negotiate the best deal with law firms?
LACCA’s legal spend survey found a large discrepancy between what in-house departments spend on technology and the amount they dedicate to cybersecurity. As companies strive to keep their businesses fully operational during the covid-19 pandemic, investing in cybersecurity is not high up on GCs’ priority lists but with attacks on the rise, should it be?
Doing more with less is a tough challenge. LACCA’s latest legal spend survey found most in-house teams have reduced their legal budget in the last year, a period when workloads have increased and the complexity of legal issues facing companies has deepened as a result of the covid-19 pandemic. Balancing less budget with more responsibilities has led GCs across the region to find windows of opportunity in unlikely places.