The Needs Assessment station is about ensuring the legal department genuinely understands the true legal needs of its internal clients — not just the requests they submit.

Internal clients often describe what they want, not what they actually need. A mature legal function does not simply process instructions; it actively profiles the business, understands how different parts of the organisation operate, and interrogates demand to determine what legal support will create the most value.

This station on the Internal Client Line requires legal to ask better questions, understand business context, and recognise patterns of demand across functions, projects, and time periods.

Without a structured needs assessment capability, legal teams become reactive order-takers. With it, they become informed business partners.

The Needs Assessment station should enable the legal department to:

◼️ Engage Directly with Internal Clients: Actively discuss business objectives and constraints.

◼️ Profile Business Units: Understand how different functions operate and generate risk or value.

◼️ Understand Demand Drivers: Identify why legal support is being requested.

◼️ Differentiate Work Types: Recognise materially different categories of legal work.

◼️ Assess Urgency vs Importance: Separate genuine priority from perceived urgency.

◼️ Identify Repeat Demand: Spot recurring needs suitable for standardisation or self-help.

◼️ Understand Commercial Context: Appreciate revenue, cost, and risk implications.

◼️ Surface Hidden Risk: Identify issues not explicitly raised by the client.

◼️ Support Better Prioritisation: Inform triage and resource allocation decisions.

◼️ Feed Downstream Stations: Provide inputs into service charters, workflow analytics, and resourcing.

Not all internal client legal demand is the same. Treating it as such is one of the fastest ways to misallocate legal resources.

A practical needs assessment differentiates between the following core categories:

◼️ Business As Usual (BAU):
The operational grind — recurring contracts, routine advice, compliance queries, and standard support required to keep the business running.

◼️ Revenue Projects:
Legal work directly linked to generating revenue, such as customer contracts, partnerships, product launches, and commercial negotiations.

◼️ Special Projects:
Exceptional or infrequent events including acquisitions, disposals, restructures, capital raises, and major corporate initiatives.

◼️ X-Factors:
Unanticipated or disruptive matters such as litigation, regulatory shocks, crises, or novel risk scenarios that fall outside normal planning.

Understanding these categories allows legal to prioritise intelligently, design fit-for-purpose service models, and avoid applying BAU processes to non-BAU problems.

The Needs Assessment station is considered a Foundational and Repeater resource within the GLS Legal Operations model.

A Foundational Resource: Is responsible for determining the overall performance capabilities of a “critical” legal function. If it is not optimised, the function can never be optimised. 

A Repeater Resource: Supports the performance of multiple "critical" legal functions and as such represents a "ripple effect" productivity intervention point. 

A Specialist Resource: Is responsible for driving the performance of a very specific part of an individual legal function. Its productivity contribution is limited to that single legal function. 

The best practice features of an effective Needs Assessment capability include:

◼️ Active Engagement: Legal proactively engages with the business, not just intake forms.

◼️ Business Literacy: Lawyers understand how the business actually operates.

◼️ Clear Categorisation: Legal demand is segmented into meaningful work types.

◼️ Contextual Questioning: Requests are explored, not accepted at face value.

◼️ Repeat Demand Identification: Patterns are identified and addressed systemically.

◼️ Prioritisation Discipline: Decisions are based on value and risk, not volume.

◼️ Consistency: Similar needs are assessed in similar ways across the organisation.

◼️ Integration with Intake: Needs assessment informs LSRFs and workflows.

◼️ Feedback Loops: Insights are fed into service design and training.

◼️ Leadership Visibility: Demand insights inform strategic decision-making.

A structured Needs Assessment delivers business value by:

◼️ Improving Speed: Legal engages correctly the first time.

◼️ Reducing Friction: Fewer misunderstandings between legal and the business.

◼️ Better Risk Outcomes: Issues are identified earlier.

◼️ Smarter Resource Allocation: Legal effort matches business importance.

◼️ Improved Commercial Support: Revenue work receives appropriate focus.

◼️ Greater Predictability: Demand patterns become visible.

◼️ Reduced Rework: Fewer late-stage corrections.

◼️ Better Planning: Legal can anticipate demand rather than react to it.

◼️ Improved Trust: Legal demonstrates understanding of the business.

◼️ Scalable Support: Growth does not automatically mean chaos.

For the legal department, effective Needs Assessment enables:

◼️ Higher-Quality Instructions: Better inputs lead to better outputs.

◼️ Reduced Noise: Fewer poorly framed or unnecessary requests.

◼️ Stronger Prioritisation: Clear rationale for what gets attention.

◼️ Improved Workload Management: Less firefighting.

◼️ Better Use of Senior Lawyers: Expertise applied where it matters.

◼️ Data-Driven Decisions: Demand insights inform resourcing.

◼️ Foundation for Automation: Repeat work is identified and systemised.

◼️ Stronger Client Relationships: Legal is seen as thoughtful, not obstructive.

◼️ Lower Burnout Risk: Work becomes more controlled and purposeful.

◼️ Transformation Readiness: Enables downstream optimisation.

The Needs Assessment station is essential for:

◼️ Business Unit Leaders

◼️ Commercial & Sales Teams

◼️ Finance & Strategy Teams

◼️ Project & Transformation Teams

◼️ Procurement Teams

◼️ Compliance & Risk Functions

◼️ Legal Operations Teams

◼️ Senior Executives

◼️ In-House Lawyers

◼️ External Counsel supporting the business

Where Needs Assessment is weak or absent, organisations experience:

◼️ Misprioritised Work: Low-value tasks crowd out high-value work.

◼️ Late Engagement: Legal is brought in after decisions are made.

◼️ Excessive Rework: Issues surface too late.

◼️ Overloaded Teams: Everything feels urgent.

◼️ Poor Use of Expertise: Senior lawyers do junior work.

◼️ Invisible Demand: No understanding of workload drivers.

◼️ Ineffective Automation: Tools are applied to the wrong problems.

◼️ Client Frustration: Legal appears slow or disconnected.

◼️ Higher Cost: External spend increases unnecessarily.

◼️ Stalled Transformation: Downstream improvements fail.

Supporting effective Needs Assessment requires:

◼️ Structured Intake Data: Capturing demand characteristics at source.

◼️ Categorisation Logic: Ability to tag work by type and value.

◼️ Analytics Capability: Visibility into demand patterns.

◼️ Workflow Integration: Needs inform routing and prioritisation.

◼️ Dashboards: Demand trends visible to leadership.

◼️ Configurability: Categories evolve as the business changes.

◼️ Knowledge Integration: Links to playbooks and self-help tools.

◼️ Scalability: Works as volume increases.

◼️ Data Quality Controls: Reliable inputs drive reliable insight.

◼️ Change Enablement: Easy refinement over time.