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Overwhelming work volume remains a significant challenge in-house
Law departments and their external providers are combating onerous workloads by focusing on short-term solutions, research shows.
Jerome Doraisamy
New research from Consilio, an e-discovery, document review, flexible legal talent, and legal advisory and transformation consulting services provider, has found that nearly one in two (48 per cent) legal, risk and compliance professionals rank overwhelming work volume as the biggest challenge they face.
Amid this heavy workload, Consilio detailed in a statement, legal professionals also cite growing budgetary restraints, rising e-discovery costs, global complexities, and headcount freezes as additional headwinds.
The provider’s fifth annual survey – Beyond the Gridlock: Overcoming the Challenges of Modern Legal Work, which surveyed 212 legal, risk, and compliance professionals in corporate law departments and law firms from Asia and the Middle East, Australia, the United Kingdom and Europe, and the United States – further found that three in five (60 per cent) professionals are prioritising smaller, operational reinventions to bring about process improvements that combat their ever-escalating workload.
This is in spite, the provider said, of a growing appetite to leverage large-scale innovations in the legal profession.
Professionals globally, Consilio outlined, are focused on addressing near-term increasing workload challenges by prioritising four key areas: contract management, regulatory compliance and risk management, information governance and records retention, and legal project management solutions.
“In doing so, legal teams can free up bandwidth for longer-term, larger-scale transformative innovation,” it said.
Four of the five last annual surveys, Consilio said, have shown that managing and prioritising the volume of work is the biggest challenge for professionals. This is due, the provider said, “to increasing data volumes and complexity, whilst more stringent regulation and global data standards have added to the challenge”.
Elsewhere, three in 10 (31 per cent) respondents said that improving operational efficiency is a top challenge, reflecting an ongoing need for streamlined workflow processes, Consilio noted.
Some respondents, the provider observed, felt that tech, which is supposed to help alleviate workload, “can actually add layers of complexity” – particularly when not fully immersed into existing workflows or optimised for current processes.
The survey also found that two in three (67 per cent) respondents think tech can increase efficiency in contract management, while 40 per cent feel the same about compliance and risk management, and 38 per cent say this for information governance and records retention.
Speaking about the findings, Consilio managing director of global strategic client experience Michael Pontrelli (pictured) said: “We’ve continued to see the sheer scale of workload forcing many legal professionals to focus on fixing the here and now, which our research quantitatively reinforces.”
“To enable them to allocate their efforts and resources towards innovative new technologies that can one day lessen their workload, right now, respondents are focused on smaller reinventions of how they structure their daily work.
“Effective regulatory compliance, risk management, and information governance navigation are critical to unlocking bandwidth so that teams can focus on long-term transformation down the line.”
Jerome Doraisamy
Jerome Doraisamy is the editor of Lawyers Weekly and HR Leader. He has worked at Momentum Media as a journalist on Lawyers Weekly since February 2018, and has served as editor since March 2022. In June 2024, he also assumed the editorship of HR Leader. Jerome is also the author of The Wellness Doctrines book series, an admitted solicitor in NSW, and a board director of the Minds Count Foundation.
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