Rising Trend For In-house Litigation

One of the clearest trends of the recent years has been the growth of in-house legal functions. Internal legal departments have been upsizing and upskilling for a number of years, faced with declining budgets for external legal spend. A common assumption in the industry (although perhaps in private practice only?) was that in-house teams would manage more business-as-usual legal work, while continuing to send more complex and business critical matters externally. Litigators were particularly vulnerable to this assumption, and probably overly confident that claims, start to finish, would continue to be handled largely by external firms.

Recent High Court claims data shows that confidence may have been misplaced.