To welcome 2020, Corporate Counsel spoke to several general counsel about what they say will impact their work and the legal industry. From outside counsel merging with other law firms to the use of artificial intelligence to keep down legal department costs, these are some of the trends in-house counsel may find themselves dealing with in the new year.

Chas Rampenthal: General Counsel, LegalZoom.com Inc.

I believe that 2020 is going to be the first year we see some of the Big Four jumping into U.S. markets, like truly jumping into the U.S. legal market. It's a prediction. And those guys are typically a little bit risk-averse, so I could be jumping the gun a little.

Chas Rampenthal.

But right now you have the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers in at least five different states talking about how they need to change the lawyer ownership rules to allow companies not owned by lawyers to start providing legal services here in the U.S. Look at Utah, where they're saying straight up if you've got a business model that you want to try in Utah you come tell us and we'll let you do it. They've talked to the LegalZooms about it. They've talked with other legal tech companies. And I can't imagine that they're not talking to the Big Four. And I think we're going to see those guys start to take a foothold in doing more U.S. work. Maybe it starts out federal or in one or two states, but after a while it's going to be hard to deny that it's here to stay.

I'm looking at this from a corporate legal department perspective. When you take a look at what the Axioms and the Elevates of the world are doing, they're doing that thing that law firms have been lax to do, which is put tons of legal operations technology and process refinement around the legal service that they're providing, which allows them to do it at such a great rate. But one of the places where they've been unable to go is providing legal services directly to a company.

The business model of law starves innovation because it starves people and money from the traditional law firm setting. These companies, they aren't starved for people or for money in the same way. It's a big if, and I have no inside knowledge, but I just get the idea that the U.S. is on the cusp of accepting some level of new business model when it comes to law. And in doing so I think it's going to unlock the potential of the corporate legal department first.

D. Cameron Findlay: General Counsel, Archer Daniels Midland Co.

One trend that I see is an acceleration of the consolidation of big law firms into mega law firms. It seems like every week one of our firms calls me and tells me that they are going to announce a merger with another firm or are considering a merger with another firm and so I don't have any statistics to back this up, but it just seems like the wave of consolidation that occurred in the early 2000s just keeps accelerating even more.

Cameron Findlay.

In terms of the benefits to in-house counsel, for a big multinational company like ADM, I have to admit that it's nice to know that our principal firms can handle a broader array of matters in a broad array of geographies. It is kind of nice to call up, if you have an investigation that crosses national boundaries, and say, "Can you handle it without hiring other firms in other countries?" But there are disadvantages, too. I am assuming law firms are not doing this to make less money. So they must assume that they're going to get paid more by companies like ours. And unlike when companies merge to gain cost savings, you just don't see that as much with law firms.

It does raise the possibility of conflicts. I've had at least a couple questions that have arisen this year because law firms have merged with firms with which we've had disputes in the past. And so we've had to work through those sorts of things. And I think one of the reasons firms do it is to enable their colleagues to cross-sell with existing clients at the other firm. If you're not careful it can place a burden on in-house counsel as they're asked to meet with the Dubai office or the Shanghai office or the securities law practice of the firm that your firm just merged with.

We've been able to work out those situations, but they can be kind of awkward. And in some cases you're somewhat surprised that the firm didn't figure out the issue before they did the merger. But that's just a fact of life these days.

James Chosy: Executive Vice President and General Counsel, U.S. Bancorp

Well-being is another topic that has been getting a lot of attention through the [American Bar Association] and the ABA Pledge. It's long past time since the profession paid attention to these dismal statistics.