Hi there,
As I recently explained to one GC, everything that an in-house lawyer does (or ideally should do) can be broken down into two buckets.
🎯 The first is to provide legal and strategic advice to the business.
🎯 The second is to procure or buy legal services for the business.
For a lot of the legal industry, this is a really new way of thinking about the role of an in-house team.
But when 50%+ of your in-house matters are fielded to an outside firm, how you select, engage, and manage your outside firms plays a critical role in your ability to provide sound and timely legal and strategic advice to the business.
When I share this concept with legal leaders, they then naturally want to know:
“What can I do to help my team get better at this second bucket?”
Here’s what I would tell any team who is looking to upskill their in-house team's procurement chops.
1. Stop underestimating lawyers’ capacity for change 💡
How many times has our team heard this objection from a legal ops leader:
“We’ve done a survey internally and we don’t think many of our lawyers are going to use it. We don’t need another tech investment that just sits on a shelf.”
I think in-house lawyers often get a bad rap for being resistant to change or blocking innovation. ⛔
Sure, there are some who are irretrievably stuck in the past and will never change.
But as lawyers, we’re a highly driven bunch, constantly striving to be the best version of ourselves. 🏆
So when lawyers continue to revert to calling up their same 2 or 3 relationship firms and blindly accepting pricing that involves a time-based multiple of whatever hourly rate has been negotiated for that year — I don’t think it's simply because they’re lazy or incapable of change.
If you can take an old(ish)-school firm managing partner and turn him into a legal-tech CEO 🤷🏻♂️…well just about anything is possible.
In short, we’ve got to start reframing the role of the in-house lawyer.
They need to understand that if they want to be the best version of themselves, it’s not enough to just give sound strategic and legal advice — they’ve also got to show they’re an expert in buying the legal services that they can’t themselves provide.
After all, that is 50% of the job.
If in-house lawyers more clearly understand the importance of being an expert at this second “bucket,” I guarantee they will be up for the challenge.
2. Give your in-house lawyers a roadmap for success 🗺️
As we look at the enterprise clients on PERSUIT who are having great success with their legal procurement program, one commonality stands out.
They all have clear guidelines and guardrails around how to manage their OC sourcing decisions.
This most often looks like a decision tree 🌳 that helps in-house lawyers determine:
1️⃣ Whether they needed outside counsel in the first place.
2️⃣ If so, what type of legal provider — a secondment, ALSP, mid-tier, boutique, or top-tier firm — is the best fit for the complexity, risk, and matter type.
3️⃣ What are the best fee structure and competitive guidelines for engaging that legal service provider, depending on the matter type and projected legal spend.
For example, most of PERSUIT’s customers require any matters over a certain threshold of projected spend to go through a competitive RFP process.
Some teams set up similar thresholds or guidelines to mandate the use of auctions or AFAs.
As they begin to put these guidelines in place, many teams are surprised to find that their in-house lawyers quickly become comfortable with the exercise and discipline of using an RFP process.
Once they see the benefits of a streamlined process and communication with firms, it becomes a no-brainer.
3. Equip them with the right tools 🛠️
There’s nothing worse than having tools that are ill-equipped for the job.
If you relegate your in-house lawyers to using a clunky, generic procurement tool that’s also used by product to source ball bearings or micro-chips…well, you’re setting yourself up to fail.
In legal services procurement, there’s really only one tool that’s fit for purpose. 😉
But don’t take my word for it.
As we recently heard from one happy client (a top 10 global bank):
“Just last week our procurement department audited all departments on their processes for spend on external parties, and legal — powered by PERSUIT of course — came out as best in class.”
Cheers,
Jim
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