Helping Busy In-House Legal Teams Find the Time

This is a photo of my laptop keyboard after two and a half years as a General Counsel. The laptop I used to review contracts in the carpool lane, facilitate a virtual board meeting I scheduled to sync up with halftime at my son’s soccer game or send that last email in the doctor’s office before the doctor reappeared to tell me that surprisingly (sarcasm) the sharp pain was stress related.

I’m not a workaholic who just couldn’t let go. And I’d prefer to have a keyboard that still displays vowels. The reality is in-house legal workloads continue to increase and some of that work is difficult to outsource. Business leaders aren’t expecting significant outside legal spend for what I consider the quick and dirty legal work (ex: commercial contracts, whatever that sales guy called about at 5 pm on Friday). What are the in-house lawyers for?

However, in-house legal department growth often falls behind other departments. New legal hires may be justified by an overflowing backlog instead of a desire to get ahead of legal needs. If a company has one lawyer, it  needs three. After a new legal hire is finally approved, time is needed to recruit and train and, by that time, you need two more lawyers.

I had to take a break from LinkedIn for a while when I was an in-house lawyer. I was bombarded with well-intentioned LinkedIn advice that only reminded me of the obstacles I faced as an in-house leader without providing immediate solutions. I’d scroll through to see:

‍Them: Automate, Use AI.

‍Me:  Where do I find the time to evaluate, implement and provide training for these solutions? Which revenue impacting contract do I put down to get this done?‍

Them: Let go of perfectionism and delegate.

‍Me: To whom?!!! My whole team is drowning.

‍Them: Real legal leaders read all the company financials and industry news, join all the business meetings and design and engineer the products (more sarcasm).

‍Me: Agreed, but again, where is the time?

I finally decided to stop asking these questions and provide the answer through Extended Counsel LLC. To help busy in-house legal teams find the time, without high legal spend. This is exactly the kind of overflow support our Outside General Counsel service is built for. If your legal team needs help with overflow or legal operations work, or maybe just a break, schedule your free consultation meeting here!