What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?

We use external counsel primarily in cases where we do not have the specific legal expertise in-house, for litigation matters or in complex, or time sensitive matters where we need additional resources to complement our in-house team’s work.

Some of the important criteria for our evaluation of external counsel’s performance we apply are: up-to-date expert knowledge; providing practical and/or alternative solutions by taking into account our local set-up; clear and timely communication using language that considers the fact that we may need to share legal advice with internal stakeholders that are not lawyers; drafting memos that start with an executive summary and timely delivery of the requested work product.

Therefore, we prefer to engage external counsel who know the way we work, how our organisation is structured and who acknowledge (and accommodate) that different types of stakeholders require a different level of detail in legal advice.

Looking forward, what trends do you foresee in the legal landscape over the next 5–10 years that companies should prepare for?

Clearly, AI is and will be the dominating factor in shaping the future of the legal landscape. We will see more Legal Tec companies offering their services for work that can be standardised, or where no negotiation or custom-tailored solutions are necessary, thus, alleviating legal departments from a lot of the high volume/ “low value” work.

Also, I would expect that Legal Departments will look to employ Legal Tec experts, who are not necessarily trained lawyers, to complement their inhouse-lawyer teams.

Further, Legal Departments when negotiating fees with external counsel will need to consider that law firms will also increasingly be using AI, such as Harvey, for certain legal work which brings down the hours spent on legal assignments. Therefore, they should oblige law firms to disclose those activities for which AI has been used and to invoice them at a correspondingly lower hourly rate.