This week Martin Glenn, chief executive of United Biscuits, issued a rallying cry to general counsel. He called on them to build muscular, "solutions oriented" legal teams that understood their companies and had the ability to spot risks and opportunities – especially the kind that may not be on the radar of staff at the corporate coal face. 

Speaking at the eleventh Legal Week Corporate Counsel Forum, Glenn recognised that UK GCs had already come a long way from the old stereotype of the "chummy non-executive". At the same time, the fallout from the credit crunch has undoubtedly helped push GCs in the UK and Europe closer to the centre of their companies given the avalanche of regulations that followed the banking crisis and renewed rigour about risk.

But one interesting new demand from Glenn was his call for in-house lawyers to build a legally aware culture throughout their businesses with training programmes. This would, he argued, mitigate the risk that a strong legal team leads inevitably to less accountability in the rest of the business. 

As far as most GCs are concerned, Glenn is pushing at an open door with his suggestions. In-house lawyers have been striving to get closer to their businesses for a decade. Indeed, several GCs at the conference said they had already started to let non-legal business teams handle low-risk contracts, thereby saving time and money. But this is just one element of the productivity revolution that Glenn pushed on in-house teams. Another key tenet of his revolution is the demand that GCs get far more value out of their law firms – a commonly heard refrain.

Striking evidence of the response to such requests came in July, when Legal Week research showed half of the top 30 UK law firms had set up low-cost legal centres or were sending work to legal process outsourcing providers (LPOs). And last year's Legal Week Intelligence Client Satisfaction Report found in-house lawyers were getting better value out of firms without quality of advice and service suffering. This suggests that law firms are indeed adapting to the emergence of the ever-more muscular in-house legal teams that CEOs like Glenn want to see.

But to test this proposition, we are adding two important questions to our annual survey of more than 1,000 in-house counsel. This autumn, as well as asking GCs to rate firms on factors such as service delivery, commercial awareness and legal advice, we will also be asking them to measure how successfully firms are deploying LPO and flexible workforces, including paralegals and legal executives.

The response will provide a fascinating insight into just how successful in-house teams have been in forcing through the kind of hard-edged 'commercial' relations with law firms so craved by Glenn and his ilk.