In-House Legal Tip: Reduce Legal Dept. Costs with Value Creation

1 min • 27 Jun 23

“Cost savings are an inevitable byproduct of carefully thought out and implemented legal dept. value creation initiatives. As such, the focus should always be on value creation.”

Matthew Glynn – GLS Group

If your Board capped your legal team’s budget for next year at US$100,000 dollars and said they want cost savings and more value from your legal department, which of the following would you want to deliver?

1. Business As Usual: Continuing with the same sourcing patterns to stick to the budget and what is familiar as you are too busy to change.
Analysis: Well done you, for sticking to a budget. Watch out for any icebergs.

2. Cost Saving Sourcing: Finding a new support provider (risky!) which delivers the same historic support but for US$90,000 (i.e., US$10,000 saving)
Analysis: Risky way to save $10K – but where is the value?

3. Basic Value Creation: Spending US$100,000 on resources & processes that allow your team to substantially reduce the support effort required for historic workflows and re-focus on more strategic (and satisfying) things.
Analysis: Long-term cost savings, plenty of strategic advisory value add.

4. Transformation Value Creation: doing (c) and showing the Board a full “Value Creation Report” that sets out the deals enabled, projects supported, dollars and man-hours hours saved.
Analysis: Everyone likes a winner. Your stock has risen within the business. Expect greater support/budget for your plans next year.

Don’t make the mistake of allowing a myopic focus on cost savings to cobble your ability to improve in-house legal team performance.

You will see that significant cost savings are an attendant and constant companion of value creation.

Pulling out unnecessary costs from your typical legal department operations is an easy task. Later in the week, we shall flag up strategies to achieve this.

In the interim, if you want to learn more about strategies to help your in-house legal team reduce costs and boost performance – CLICK HERE

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Please check out the GLS solutions and know-how resources listed on the right side of this page – they might assist your legal team with the issues explored in this Blog.