To kick off the year's Harbor Sounding Boards for Corporate Law Departments community program, Harbor hosted Sounding Board sessions focused on specific industry sectors, bringing together over 120 legal ops professionals across five key industries:
- Financial services and insurance
- Manufacturing, retail, and consumer goods
- Tech/media/telecom
- Energy and utilities
- Healthcare
These sessions each provided a forum to discuss industry-specific trends and nuances from the annual Harbor Law Department Benchmarking Survey, and to identify critical priorities for law departments in 2024.
During the sessions, we conducted live polling to gather real-time data on what corporate law departments in each sector see as the priorities in terms of talent, technology, and outside counsel management. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these polls were largely aligned with the Benchmarking Survey results shared at the end of 2023, which, for instance, saw law departments increasing the workload of existing resources to handle higher demand—as well as a growing interest in artificial intelligence and other data-driven technologies. That said, there are important differences between industries, too.
In this briefing, we’ll explore those differences and highlight common themes and key priorities for law departments in 2024.
Resource optimization and data-driven decisions are critical
The overarching theme that clearly resonated in our live polling was that resource optimization is key. Across all industries, “resource optimization” was far and away the number one talent initiative respondents said their departments were focused on in 2024—ahead of other initiatives like competency frameworks, diversity, employee engagement, leadership/management development, org structure enhancements, and training programs.
This is right in line with the Law Department Survey, which found that 80% of legal teams expected an increase in demand, with nearly half saying they will handle it by either increasing the workload of existing resources (46%), increasing the use of current technology (46%), or redistributing work to an appropriate resource (42%).
It follows, then, that when asked about system enhancements they’re focused on in 2024, many respondents cited improvements related to legal service requests and other intake mechanisms. These can help law departments understand who is requesting what type of work and then use that data to help automatically disseminate that work, aligning its risk and complexity with the appropriate resource—an especially useful tool as teams become increasingly remote and dispersed.
The focus on resource optimization extends to outside counsel relationships, too: for instance, respondents cited initiatives like “Firm stratification,” “Use of RFP software to select and engage outside counsel,” and “Leveraging dashboards to select firms,” as key outside counsel programs for 2024. In other words, to optimize their resources, law departments are looking to ensure that they match the risk and complexity of matters with the price point and expertise of the firms, driven by improved reporting and data visibility at the time of firm selection.
Industry differences: Highly regulated sectors show more hesitancy
Following Harbor’s discussion of the Survey and associated best practices, we asked participants to self-evaluate their level of maturity around the three topics of talent, technology, and outside counsel. While there was broad consistency in maturity levels, with most industries self-rating between 3 and 4 on a 5 point scale.
Small differences in our live polling data, however, reveal important nuances. For instance, tech companies are unsurprisingly the most mature (3.72) regarding technology, while industries like financial services and insurance and energy and utilities are slightly less so (3.20 and 3.57, respectively). The highly regulated, often more longstanding nature of organizations in these sectors may play a role, here, as they must evaluate more risks and navigate a preponderance of legacy technologies.
On the other hand, these organizations rank highest on talent maturity (3.83 in financial services and insurance, 3.80 in energy and utilities) of any sectors we polled. Again, that might be partly due to the strong foundation and history of companies in these industries, where people have been there a long time and solidified talent frameworks.
Healthcare and manufacturing respondents ranked lowest in talent (healthcare) and technology (manufacturing) maturity—hinting, perhaps, at the impact of pandemic-era burnout in the former and historically slower technology adoption in the latter.
Now is the time to re-engage with data
It’s understandable that many law departments have yet to fully embrace the power of data-driven decision making. After all, the past few years have presented significant roadblocks, from economic uncertainty and a global pandemic to changing work models and rapid technology advancements.
But if the data from the Law Department Survey and Sounding Boards' polling provide one key takeaway, it’s that 2024 is the year to re-engage with gathering and acting on data to increase legal operations maturity—and to better optimize existing resources amid growing demand.
- Outside counsel management
- Law Department Benchmarking Survey
- AI
- Show all 5