Legal Budgeting in the New Normal

COVID has upended the economy and increased legal volume and risk. While GCs have traditionally relied on precedent when building their budgets, this incremental model may no longer serve them.

For years, GCs have been pushing their law firm partners for discounts and alternative billing structures while building bigger in-house departments to reduce outside counsel expense, but the legal operating model has remained largely the same.

Enter COVID, which has challenged the very notion of precedent. Normal is gone. Business leaders are now navigating through an unfamiliar and unknown new normal.

GCs should dare to meet this moment. They must challenge business precedent where it no longer serves them, and they can start with the budget. Using the COVID economy as a forcing mechanism, GCs can fundamentally reexamine how they build, and spend, their traditional legal budgets.

In our new whitepaper, we examine how forward-looking GCs can rethink their budgets to cement their reputations as change agents, and to serve as strong partners to the CFO and business units.

The paper discusses:

• Why approaching the budget with typical incremental changes based on precedent may no longer make sense in the COVID economy
• How different approaches to budgeting may be better suited to the legal department, and can enable alignment, cost reduction, and improved communication with business partners
• Why reexamining legal workstreams and breaking them down into discrete matters is the critical first step toward rethinking legal spend, and how doing so can help transform the legal operating model

To learn more about how innovative GCs can leverage the budgeting process to eschew precedent in favor of meaningful change that improves efficacy, efficiency, and legal outcomes, download our whitepaper, Legal Budgeting in the New Normal.