Check out our exclusive video about cutting costs, featuring Audrey Rubin, chief operating officer of Aon's law department.

A recent survey from the American Cleaning Institute, which represents the U.S. cleaning products industry, found that 89 percent of Americans said they were very or somewhat likely to do some spring cleaning this year. Some plan to tackle the grime that's built up in their kitchens. Others want to scrub their windows to a shine. Whatever cleaners have on their to-do lists, they likely are aspiring to restore order and calm to spaces that have become messy and stressful over time.

Shouldn't law departments do the same?

Many legal consultants say yes. But they're not necessarily recommending that lawyers break out the mops and buckets. Rather, they say in-house departments should clear away clutter in order to streamline their operations—and save money.

Although tidying work processes to reduce spending may be easier said than done, experts say counsel who take a big-picture approach to trimming costs can make significant strides. To do so, in-house teams must scrutinize their overall responsibilities, business partnerships and procedures instead of just focusing on one area in which to decrease spending. This allows legal departments to boost operational efficiency while spotting unnecessary or exorbitant expenses, and discovering ways to reduce or eliminate them.

On the following pages, experts discuss three ways legal departments can effectively control and cut costs.

1. Analyze Workflows

Joy Saphla, managing director at Huron Legal, says that legal departments panic all too often when it comes to reducing spending. Typically, she says, their knee-jerk reaction is to shrink their internal headcounts or immediately ask their law firms for steep discounts.

“But that's kind of like if you have a balloon and you push it on one end, it's going to enlarge the other end,” she says. “You haven't really accomplished cost reduction—you've accomplished the appearance of cost reduction. You need to take a step back and take a methodical look at it. It needs to be sustainable.”

Likewise, Jonathan Bellis, managing director at HBR Consulting, has seen other lukewarm cost-cutting attempts. “I'm not impressed by legal departments that eliminate travel and things like that,” he says. “I don't see how that enhances the long-term talent and value of the department.”

Experts say the most effective way to reduce costs is to conduct workflow analyses, which essentially study how tasks are distributed within and outside of the law department. The goal of such analyses is to help in-house teams logically redistribute work to maximize its value, implement the correct processes so they can effectively manage their work portfolios on an ongoing basis, and better estimate and plan for their projected legal spending. To begin, consultants recommend that legal departments conduct a soup-to-nuts examination of how work enters and exits a department, as well as what types of work a department handles.

“You have to look inside and figure out what they're doing, why they're doing it and whether it should be done,” Saphla says. “You have to look at the work in terms of its value to the corporation and the effort it requires to do the work.”

Dan DiLucchio, a principal at Altman Weil Inc., conducts work samplings by asking lawyers, paralegals and support staff to keep track of what they do, who they work with and how they spend their time over a two-week period. “For a lot of organizations, and for the individuals doing it, that is revealing,” he says. “It highlights ways to be more effective and more efficient in what you're doing. One client we worked with realized that about 15 percent to 20 percent of the lawyers' time was spent doing paralegal-type work.”

Bellis says in-house lawyers often accrue nonlegal work because they are filling voids for their clients, who may have cut back. “The clients look at the lawyers and say, 'You're smart, you can negotiate. I'll let you run with the whole contract, not just the legal terms. I'll ask you to draft the press release even though that's going beyond legal review and input,'” he says.

After ascertaining who currently is doing what work, legal teams should categorize all tasks to determine what work is high-effort or high-risk, which lawyers should handle what work and what tasks are commodity-type assignments that paralegals or support staff could handle. Teams also must be honest about what work they're doing out of habit as opposed to necessity. This helps them decide what work they should push back to the client, assign to other appropriate internal employees, allocate to automated technology resources or delegate to outside legal service providers.

LPOs Grow

When it comes to outside providers, some legal departments find they can save money by sending work to legal process outsourcing (LPO) companies or offshore providers instead of law firms.