The report, Mapping the Moral Compass, is the second stage of an initiative to assess the ethical approach of and pressures on the in-house profession. Based on 400 responses, the report documents what was already apparent anecdotally: employed lawyers face considerable and specific ethical pressure points. While those tensions are not obviously more severe than in private practice, there is a far less developed framework to manage them. Continue reading “‘Trust the lawyers’ won’t cut it”

Let’s start with an assumption: we will reach peak in-house. Though the in-house profession has hugely expanded over the last 15 years – those in the private sector growing threefold since 2000 to over 16,000 solicitors in England and Wales by 2015 – in-house legal teams cannot keep growing forever.

At some point companies will tire of employing more lawyers. At some point lower cost providers than law firms will make such expensive recruitment harder to justify. At some point the money for expanding legal budgets (and the available data in the US and UK shows they are still expanding) will run out. And, as the joke goes, when the money runs out, it is time to start thinking. Continue reading “Working smarter”