Next Gen Legal Solutions Index

It’s accepted wisdom that two, seemingly contradictory, things can be true at the same time. This is what the results from our first Next Gen Solutions Survey show us: the roadmap to meeting the unmet needs and challenges of GC’s is simple and complex.

Simple, because law firms need to deliver on what we already know: tech and client experience has and continues to represent a solvable top challenge; complex, because law firms need to be highly tuned to the needs of the sector, size and location of the clients that they serve, recognising the mutual challenges but accommodating and responding to the diverse and evolving needs by reference to the individual clients.

Law firm tech is still not ticking all the necessary boxes

Legal technology has been a hot agenda item for many years now but the technology law firms are deploying on client engagements are still missing the mark for a quarter of GC’s, rising to 31% for GC’s in the Healthcare and Life Sciences sector. The survey findings won’t make easy reading for firms who demonstrated their ability to rapidly accelerate digital integration and adoption during COVID. Whatever we are all doing, Simmons included, we need to do it better and quickly if we want to close the gap on GC need.

Standing out from the crowd for the wrong reasons

In a crowded market we know that small things have a big differentiating impact, but the survey tells us that law firms are failing to meet the grade on responsiveness - a key performance indicator for client experience, for a whopping 20% of those surveyed. The survey findings on technology may well have a part to play here but for many GC’s this is just about doing the simple things well – agreeing a clear scope and plan, keeping them informed of progress, ensuring they are engaged early when things change and making sure there are no last minute surprises on costs.

Supporting legal teams requires diversity of service offerings

Individual relationships with partners and the contribution they, and their teams make, remain important to the success of GC’s businesses (23% said ‘very important’) – but it is becoming increasingly clear that GC’s are expecting law firms to offer more diversified skills, capabilities and offerings to help them solve the complex ‘business’ (rather than just ‘legal’) problems they face.

The data is there but extracting value from key legal documents is over 2 years away

The volume of data within business continues to grow at pace but the ability to extract value from NDA’s, SLA’s and contracts (amongst others) is still out of the immediate reach of the overwhelming majority of GC’s with the mean expecting to do so in 2.5 years. The good news is that over half of respondents see this as a challenge that will be resolved within the 1-2 year time-frame, representing an opportunity for law firms to significantly impact and improve that trajectory and accelerate value extraction for the 30% whose time horizon is much longer term. Read here about Simmons Wavelength where our legal and technology expertise combine. Our team of legal engineers use data science to solve complex problems.

12-18 month challenger? The new kids on the block

Given the challenge of the last few years a survey of this nature might have expected to show economic uncertainty consistently at the top of the short-term challenge list but instead we found one third of GC’s put new market entrants firmly within their sights; and the results demonstrate that this is an even bigger challenge for UK only companies with a 43% ranking. Having an eye on the competition suggests that alongside regulatory, economic and investment pressures, the GC view is a ‘business’ one and law firms need to align with the evolving needs.

Legal team dynamics continue to change

Legal teams and law firms have faced (and will continue to face) the challenge (and opportunity) of how best to resource legal teams against demand from the business and those who we employ. Whether this is through the ‘war for talent’ or organisational design that helps meet the challenge of cross-border teams and increased focus on well-being and life/work balance it’s clear that the challenge is not answered in a simple way for all. One third of GC’s suggested that the make-up of the team has changed through the addition of multi-disciplinary skills such as legal operations with the remainder identifying outsourcing, flexible resourcing and law firm secondments as their top solutions. Read about Adaptive, our flexible resourcing solution.