A corporate legal department's head count correlates to its tech adoption rate, according to a new report by the Association of Corporate Counsel.

Last week the ACC released its 2019 “Global Legal Department Benchmarking Report,” which compared corporate legal departments' staffing, outside counsel spending and technology usage. The report, which was done in partnership with Major, Lindsey & Africa and surveyed 508 legal departments from 30 countries, found that less than half of respondents are using legal technology.

But ACC associate vice president of legal management services Catherine Moynihan noted that the report's “surprisingly low adoption rate of technology across legal departments, when we look deeper into the data, is a function of most legal departments being quite small [between] one to four lawyers.” She added, “There is actually very high adoptions of all these types of technologies in the larger companies and legal departments.”

Specifically, the report found that e-signature (44%), contract management (41%) and document management (38%) were the top three tools used by corporate legal departments. Moynihan said she thinks those technologies will remain a “fundamental” tool across all legal departments because they are critical to their larger priority of knowledge management and efficiency.

Under closer examination, though, the adoption rates of such technology correlate with a larger staff.

While overall 44% of respondents said they use e-signatures, for instance, that number drops to 38% for a legal department staff with one to nine people. E-signature technology adoption rate grows to nearly 52% for a 10- to 24-person legal staff, drops to 45% for departments of 25 to 99 people and leaps to 72% for legal departments staffing 100-plus, according to an ACC document provided to Legaltech News.

Overall, as the department size grew, the adoption rate for all technology increased. Moynihan noted that adoption rate discrepancies stem from larger corporate legal departments staffing more people and a company's higher litigation rate demanding more efficiency and automation.

Outside of integration tools, while the overall adoption rate for e-discovery analytics and review was 9%, over half (53%) of law departments with 100-plus staffers said they were using e-discovery analytics and review. Likewise, while nearly 12% of all legal departments said they used e-discovery tools for collections and processing, the number rose to 65% of large legal departments.

Moynihan explained that e-discovery tools were adopted less often by smaller legal departments because, like the other low-adopted technologies in the survey, they were more likely to use outside counsel or vendors for those matters.

“It's understandable if it's a lower priority because how e-discovery is managed. It is most often outsourced. That said, once again it's really true across the board that the larger the company, the larger the legal department and the more likely they will have that in-house,” Moynihan said.

The report also found that Microsoft was the most-used vendor for contract, document and records management; workflow tools; collaboration/knowledge management; analytics; and integration tools. Microsoft is common as a vendor for legal departments because it's “ubiquitous enterprise wide,” Moynihan said. “Everyone has SharePoint because it's part of your suite in Microsoft,” she added.

Still, Microsoft wasn't the only vendor highlighted multiple times, Thomson Reuters was listed as the most common vendor for matter management and e-billing, while Relativity was also cited twice for e-discovery collections and analytics.