
Four key focus areas for 2016
More than 70% of executives’ report that the pace of change has increased. There are several causes are responsible for this acceleration.
Read the articleRecent research suggests only 31 percent of corporate middle managers who had a legal problem went to the legal department with the problem.
Some legal functions have been tempted to combat this by ‘clinging on harder’. Forcing all decisions through legal sign-off and, in the process, becoming a resented, overworked, chokepoint for the business.
Leading functions are pursuing a number of concurrent strategies to move with the times.
The ultimate aim of these strategies is to move the focus of the function from ‘providing legal advice’ or ‘solving legal problems’ to what research group CEB calls increasing the organisations 'Legal IQ’.
Legal IQ is defined as: managers’ propensity to understand and engage in legal issues; organizational visibility allowing the legal function to find relevant issues; and mechanisms that make it easy for clients to resolve them.
The macro trends that we mention in this article, are just like the lifestyle causes of heart disease and cancer. They don’t appear on our radar because the changes feel so incremental it is only with hindsight that we see them.
As Jack Welsh said, 'the time to change is before you have to'.
Download the ebook
A General Counsel's guide to modernising their legal function.
One of our consultants will be in touch shortly.