By Bernadette Bulacan, chief evangelist, Icertis
The road ahead for how we work is uncertain, and the legal profession, like every other organisation, is poised to feel the effects of the Great Resignation. Unlike lawyers in private law firm practice, corporate counsel are unlikely to be offered huge bonuses and pay increases as incentives to stay. On the flip side, this shake-up could also reinvigorate in-house practice, depending on what measures legal department leaders take to meet new expectations of corporate counsel and staff.
In the face of pandemic, uncertainty, and the end of the furlough scheme in October 2021, workers shocked their employers by leaving their jobs in record numbers. UK job moves hit a record high of 988,000 in the final three months of 2021, and the level of open vacancies is now the highest on record. Findings by Slack also uncovered that the legal industry was most likely to be affected by this mass migration of staff, with 44% of employees considering other options. And more departures could be on the way. According to Ipsos, over half of British workers are considering changing their jobs.
While reasons vary, working patterns and heavy workloads are among the rationales most cited by employees, long months of remote work gave legal professionals time away from their office lives to re-evaluate workplace routines, careers, and personal priorities.
Working from home changed everything, and while some professionals can’t wait to get back to the office, one thing’s for certain: flexible and remote work is no longer a special request in legal workplaces, they’re a must-have to recruit and retain talent. Many organisations are responding to the demand with hybrid working models. For legal teams, a partial return to the office helps restore and sustain work culture, social interaction, and mentorship, while providing a better work-life balance.
Furthermore, the spate of resignations and retirements has increased competition for talent. Generally, legal professionals are burned out from pandemic pressures and heavy workloads and expect to be compensated for the additional work. In response, many private law firms are sweetening the pot, increasing budgets for pay raises and benefits. For in-house legal departments, increased competition could spell disaster if they lose senior legal counsel to more lucrative positions and pay of private practice.
Resignations are especially challenging for legal departments since new corporate counsel tend to learn through a mentorship model. Legal workflows are often embedded and idiosyncratic, shaped by mid-level and senior lawyers who have a deep understanding of how their organisations assess risk, operate, and deliver value. The Great Resignation has forced companies to acknowledge the risk that specialised, seasoned corporate counsel might walk out the door.
Legal employers, therefore, need to recruit new talent in a highly competitive landscape, retain experienced professionals or preserve their expertise and try to balance their organisational needs with new employee demands. Fortunately, there is no shortage of creative and technological measures that can help stop the exodus. The Great Resignation provides them the opportunity and need to digitally transform. Here are some of the most promising solutions corporate counsel can consider.
Contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology can assist corporate legal departments to curb the effects of The Great Resignation. Contracts are the heart of enterprises and a pillar of in-house legal work – so it makes sense to prioritise capturing institutional knowledge here. CLM can capture and memorialise approved templates and clause libraries, playbooks with negotiation strategies and stances, and other data about contracting parties in a single, searchable platform and repository. Rather than having this know-how trapped in the heads of a few lawyers who might exit, technology can be used to capture and democratise this information for all legal team members.
Technology can be utilised to attract and recruit new in-house counsel and onboard new talent. CLM gives new employees a running start by standardising contract management processes and capturing quality and quantitative data about established contractual relationships. New corporate counsel can leverage existing templates, best-negotiating positions, and playbooks in contract generation and management within CLM technologies.
New technology also gives companies a leg up in the newly competitive market for legal talent, particularly with younger hires who expect streamlined, digital workflows. Adopting CLM demonstrates a company’s long-term investment to phase out manual administrative processes, such as monitoring approvals by email.
New tech is another way to incentivise new corporate counsel by minimising the administrative workload experienced by lawyers in connection with contracting. For instance, lawyers no longer monitor the approval process through emails. Or rather than manually extracting and organising contract data in spreadsheets, we’re seeing more corporate legal departments experiment with and embrace Artificial Intelligence to alleviate the manual and administrative load.
The legal industry is poised to weather the Great Resignation and retain their talent pool – given they meet legal professionals halfway – with flexibility, incentives, and new technology tools, like contract lifecycle management solutions.
Bernadette Bulacan is chief evangelist at leading contract management software provider Icertis.
We publish guest posts based on merit and do not charge for them. If you wish to submit an idea for a guest post, please contact Legal IT Insider’s editor on caroline@legaltechnology.com