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Many corporate entities could still be assessing the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted their financial health. But corporate legal departments shouldn't necessarily wait for the smoke to clear before addressing urgent personnel or tech needs.

During the keynote address of Corporate Counsel's weeklong "Legal Operations in a Time of Disruption" web series in May, Susan Hackett of Legal Executive Leadership encouraged participants to take advantage of the remainder of the 2020 budget cycle while they still could.

"How are we going to take the resources that are currently allocated, that haven't been clawed back, that we may not see in the next budget cycle and get some stuff rolling right now so that we can prepare ourselves to not only be addressing all of the needs for agility and the technology needed for remote work to continue and whatever it is that's going to be the priority for our business people," Hackett said.

But not all legal departments are alike. Zach Abramowitz, a consultant in the legal technology space, noted that some of the in-house teams he's spoken with are expecting no disruptions to their spending come the new year. Meanwhile, others have already seen their current 2020 budgets slashed.

However, some legal departments are very much opening their wallets now in anticipation of a more restrictive budget coming down the pike. One key area for new spend may be personnel, with Abramowitz indicating that employers are looking to take advantage of a fresh wave of legal talent emanating from recent displacements at law firms and other corporate entities.

"They are saying, 'Listen, there's never been talent available like this. There's never been people that we could probably get to come over because they are looking at their current department and their current department is firing [people].' There really are great hiring capabilities right now. I think that's what's motivating some departments to spend," Abramowitz said.

Still, this may be one trend that doesn't lend itself to generalizations. Jeff Marple, director of innovation for the legal department at Liberty Mutual Insurance, pointed out that just because revenue at a particular company might be down, that doesn't mean that the amount of legal work that needs to be done will dip as well. He thinks that legal departments facing downward expense pressure may be looking to drive efficiency by embracing automation and implementing artificial intelligence in places where maybe they haven't before.

"They are going to want to look for situations where you can buy something off of the shelf and not necessarily customize," Marple said. "You don't want a long implementation right now or a highly customized implementation. You want something that's pretty easy to pull in and start using."

Ongoing remote working could also play a role in what legal departments are spending on in the immediate future. Christopher Zegers, director of consulting services in legal at Ivionics, believes that legal departments will continue to look for ways to embrace cloud technology, both to support workers at home and limit the capacity for COVID-19 exposures.

"The best way going forward is to reduce your need to touch anything. Reduce the need for people to go into an office and fix some kind of infrastructure, waiting around for parts to show up," Zegers said.

Other practical needs that in-house departments may not be able to push off until 2020 include updates to key infrastructure components within a cybersecurity network that are "end of life" or have reached the expiration date by which a vendor ceases to deliver support services. Meanwhile, other more organizational-centric tools lacking the same urgency may be forced to wait until 2021.

"The records people, they've been wanting to update their records management software for the last 20 years and it gets pushed every year because it's just not in people's face," Zegers said.