In-House Legal Leaders Using “Three Pillar” Strategy to Mitigate Uncharted Uncertainty

New global research finds significant commonality in how legal leaders worldwide are approaching unprecedented policy and economic disruption

NEW YORK—April 24, 2025—Caught in the middle of high-stakes and uncertain policy, economic, technology, and business upheaval, legal leaders around the world are stepping up as change agents, reinventing their teams as enterprise risk managers to strengthen their organization’s resilience against turbulent, disruptive forces. That’s according to a new global study of 500 CLOs, GCs, and DGCs conducted by Wakefield Research, commissioned by Axiom, and published today.

As businesses globally tighten their belts and adopt a defensive posture to international trade and financial events, legal leaders are playing offense. They’re significantly increasing budgets and making strategic investments in legal talent and legal tech to enable their teams to better absorb unpredictable and repeated shocks hitting the corporate system.

The new research report, Investing For Uncertainty: How GCs Are Building Resilient Legal Departments in 2025, found legal teams worldwide at companies with revenue of $250 million to over $25 billion USD are surprisingly coalescing around a common “three pillar” approach to mitigating uncertainty:

• Pillar I: Transformative Investment in Legal Operations: Nearly 9 in 10 respondents are increasing legal ops spending an average of 11%, with the vast majority of those who have already established legal ops teams planning further increases. These legal ops teams are multidisciplinary, bringing together legal professionals, IT specialists, and finance experts to heighten operational efficiency and speed technology implementation.
  
  
• Pillar II: Accelerated Investment in Technology and AI Integration: The study found legal AI influences more than a third of in-house department decisions, reflecting AI’s growing impact. The downside: 7 in 10 respondents also said their teams need more comprehensive AI training and experience before they will be able to reap the game-changing potential of legal tech investments.
  
  
• Pillar III: Greater Investment in Strategic Resource Optimization: Nearly all respondents (93%) slotted flexible legal talent services and solutions into their 2025 resourcing strategy to boost capacity and optimize their budgets. CLOs, GCs, and DGCs want more elastic, agile, cost-effective legal services than law firms are providing. And they’re also demanding specialized experience, greater value for the hour, and lawyers who understand the in-house ethos and can work at today’s frenetic pace of change.

“As legal leaders look ahead at the rest of the year, they see policy, economic, and business instability unlike any time in recent history,” said David McVeigh, CEO of Axiom. “Add to that the truly disruptive nature of AI, with its complex mix of risks and rewards––and an industry-wide shortage of specialized AI legal talent and operational experience––and the pressure to make fast, smart decisions is greater than ever. The research shows industry leaders weighed these factors and landed on a clear set of strategies to maximize organizational resilience.”

Investing For Uncertainty: How GCs Are Building Resilient Legal Departments in 2025 features comparative international data and analysis spanning the USA, EMEA, and APAC, with the report engineered to make it easy to see how challenges and strategies compare internationally—where they’re unique, where they differ, and where they align. It covers worldwide trends and region-specific approaches, helping legal leaders compare their strategy to those elsewhere, and ensure they’re developing coordinated global approaches for navigating today's overly complex in-house legal atmosphere.

“What’s remarkable about these findings is the emergence of a new kind of legal leader,” said Ashlin Quirk, General Counsel at Axiom. “It reveals today’s GCs, DGCs, and CLOs are speaking the language of law and business with equal fluency. They’re not just managing legal departments. They’re building adaptive systems that turn uncertainty into opportunities with greater strategic value for the business.”

The 24-page report provides actionable frameworks, region-specific insights, and practical implementation strategies for legal departments and legal ops teams seeking to build resilience amidst uncertainty. Investing For Uncertainty: How GCs Are Building Resilient Legal Departments in 2025 is available for download at no charge at https://www.axiomlaw.com/resources/articles/gc-survey-report.

For more information or to talk to an Axiom representative, visit https://www.axiomlaw.com. For more information about Axiom, please visit our website, hear from our experts on the Inside Axiom blog, network with us on LinkedIn, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. 

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