Legal management consulting

Your Challenge

Companies need their legal teams to keep pace with the commercial needs of the business—while at the same time, legal departments are increasingly being asked to do more with the same or fewer resources. Today’s corporate General Counsel (GC) faces multiple challenges: a heightened regulatory environment, mass globalisation of business, and acceleration of technology advancements. This is resulting in increased complexity and demand from the business which is creating an unsustainable workload for existing in-house legal departments. The current business landscape creates a compelling reason for legal departments to rethink their operating model, achieve greater efficiencies and increase the value they deliver back to the business.

Why Deloitte

The legal world is transforming and Deloitte Legal is developing the tools to help legal business during this transformative time.

Deloitte's work on Legal Management Consulting (LMC) was inspired by two quite different factors:

1. The first was our study of the global legal market. We interviewed General Counsel (“GCs”) and conducted formal research with GCs, CEOs, CFOs, and other senior executives and identified a growing need for a much more disciplined and systematic approach to the management of in-house legal departments.
2. The second factor was our work during the past decade in the field of tax management consulting. Deloitte’s Tax Management Consulting (TMC) is now a global, multidisciplinary service that assists tax departments and tax directors with strategies, and advises them on operating models and technology. Learn more.

Considering an in-house lawyer’s need for rigour and process in legal functions, we decided to draw on our experience in tax and apply the TMC methodology to law practices. When we suggested this idea to lawyers, we uncovered a considerable overlap and synergy. When we raised the possibility of LMC during research and discussions with in-house counsel, the feedback was encouraging.

Our Approach

LMC is a new approach and a new discipline, developed for lawyers by lawyers and other experts. It builds on mainstream management consultancy, risk advisory services, as well as tax management consulting. LMC is a collection of models, frameworks, and systems to help in-house lawyers run their departments more efficiently and comprehensively meet their business needs. It is an attempt to capture countless person-hours of management and consulting experience into a set of services and tools. LMC focuses on operating models, technology, work-sourcing, and cost management.

Our research suggests that in-house functions are under unprecedented pressures, both internal and external, to demonstrate value, manage risk, contain costs, embrace new ways of working, introduce technology, operate globally, and align with their organisations. It is a time of transformation. It is time to transform.

Thought leadership whitepaper: In-house legal service delivery

"It ain't what you do—it's the way you do it"

The world of the in-house General Counsel and the teams they oversee is changing. While the GC was traditionally seen as the enterprise's lawyer-in-chief, they are now expected to perform a much broader role as a partner to the rest of the organization and a trusted adviser to senior management. At the same time the legal function is under pressure to cope with an expanding set of regulations, heightened public scrutiny, and business models which are adapting to digital and other opportunities.

GCs and legal teams can respond to the demands and opportunities they face and put together the business case for change. In most cases this requires them to re-evaluate how they can best go about supporting the organizations they serve. Beyond examining what specialist advice they deliver, they need to look at the way they deliver it; we call this its operating model. This document sets out Deloitte's point of view on the key components of the legal operating model and how to develop it to make the legal function fit for the future and a rewarding place for valued people to work.