Earlier this summer the ALM Pacesetter Research team reached out to legal departments to ask about their skill set gaps, and how they addressed them. The approaches explored were grouped into three basic solution categories: staffing, training, and technology. The results were not shocking, but did raise some eyebrows.

This was not a massive group, constituting 30 legal departments. More than three-fourths of the participants were with companies with more than $1 billion USD in revenues. There was a strong (unintentional) weighting in the group towards EMEA-based companies (72%), the rest being US-based. The industries were more evenly represented with the three largest groups being professional services, TMT, Wholesale, Retail, and Leisure.

One question centered on simply whether participants had dedicated legal operations resources. Most responded yes, but among the seven no's, only two were medium or small-sized firms. The Pacesetter team's recent report on legal department spend management found that having legal operations resources and capabilities was an absolute requisite for legal departments seeking to move beyond reactive cost reduction to becoming value-generation partners. When asked, "If so, are these legal operations employees lawyers, or non-lawyers (e.g., accountants, operations specialists, etc.)?" a little over half responded lawyers, while 30% responded mixed (lawyer and non-lawyer), while only 15% responded exclusively non-lawyers. This was important because our recent report on spend management in legal departments had found that one of the key functions legal operations plays for legal departments is as ambassadors for other parts of the client company, translating between legal, financial, and operational needs. This, in turn, requires a legal department that understands how to get lawyers and non-lawyers to work together effectively.