Right-sourcing: The agile legal department’s competitive advantage

For in-house corporate counsel, the perpetual mantra to “do more with less” is really just an open-ended mandate to make the most effective possible use of the people, technology, and resources at the department’s disposal. In 2020, the “more” part of the equation includes anticipating the future needs of the business and any potential legal issues the company might face, while the “less” involves allocating the workload (insourcing versus outsourcing versus techno sourcing) in a way that maximizes both the cost effectiveness and quality of the results.

In this whitepaper, Ethan Patashnik, a legal operations leader with 20 years of experience, discusses the many reasons why corporate legal departments are embracing “the business of law” by, among other things, re-evaluating how they allocate their department’s resources to manage multiple projects involving a wide variety of stakeholders.

Every legal department faces these allocation problems (AKA opportunities) and finding the right balance of solutions is a constant challenge, especially in the face of mushrooming options. Not only is every legal department increasingly staffed by people with a different blend of talents and capabilities; the tools, technology, resources, and support models available to legal departments is rapidly evolving, making the calculus that much more difficult.

No matter how a corporate legal department ends up allocating its resources, however, managers must go through some sort of decision-making process to determine what the most effective mix of insourcing, outsourcing, and techno sourcing is going to be for any given project.