LawVu’s David Lancelot Talks Research on the Cost of Legal Friction (Part 1)

In today’s business environment, every function is under pressure to operate at peak performance. Legal is no exception. As organizations face growing regulatory complexity, economic uncertainty, and heightened risk, in-house legal teams are expected to serve not just as advisors but as strategic partners who enable growth and protect the business. Yet, many legal departments remain under-resourced and behind on digital transformation compared to their peers in finance, HR, or sales.

To better understand the business impact of this gap, LawVu commissioned International Data Corporation (IDC) to survey more than 350 business and legal leaders across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The research, entitled “Legal Friction: The Real Cost to Your Business,” sheds light on what IDC terms legal friction, the operational drag caused by inefficient legal processes and fragmented workflows within legal teams and between legal and business partners. 

The findings are striking. Respondents reported that legal friction has contributed to delayed or lost revenue opportunities, higher outside counsel spend, wasted time, and even reputational damage from customer complaints.

The study also highlights a shared perspective: both business leaders and legal leaders agree that legal friction exists and materially impacts operations. Root causes include outdated processes, lack of technology adoption, and underinvestment in core legal tools such as matter management, intake systems, and enterprise legal management platforms. 

At the same time, the research identifies opportunities. By embracing process improvements, better data usage, and modern technology, legal teams can reduce friction, free up resources for higher-value work, and strengthen collaboration across the business.

To unpack these insights and explore how legal teams can translate the findings into action, Today’s General Counsel spoke with David Lancelot, Chief Legal Officer and Executive Vice President of Advocacy at LawVu.

The Q and A below reflects the first part of a three-part conversation on the survey results, the challenges of legal friction, and the opportunities for legal teams to reposition themselves as drivers of business value. The second and third installments will be published in the coming weeks.

Based on the survey findings, legal friction is costing organizations millions annually. Can you break down the financial impact of legal friction in simple terms? Can you share a real-world example where outdated legal processes directly impacted business outcomes or growth opportunities?

David Lancelot: IDC surveyed more than 350 business and legal leaders across the US, UK, and Australia to understand how inefficient legal practices impact the business. What came through very clearly is that legal often doesn’t have the same operational mindset—or the resources to put in place the people, processes, and technology—that other functions take for granted.

Think about the evolution of enterprise functions: finance adopted SAP in the ’80s, sales got Salesforce in the ’90s, marketing moved to HubSpot in the 2000s, and HR embraced Workday in the 2010s. Now, legal finally has dedicated tools, and legal operations as a profession is starting to change the game. But too many legal teams are still lagging.

That gap has real consequences. Business leaders, particularly CFOs, still tend to see legal as a cost center, asking how to reduce spend rather than how legal can accelerate outcomes. The reality is that modern tools like contract management, matter management, and intake systems can make legal a value driver. With the right data, legal can help speed up processes and align with strategic objectives. Without them, legal becomes a drag on the business, even if most executives don’t recognize the hidden costs of that friction.

The survey highlights that 70% of business leaders have bypassed legal processes altogether. What are the risks of this behavior, and how can legal teams rebuild trust and alignment across business units?

David Lancelot: I call this the “don’t tell legal” problem, and it’s dangerous. Early in my career, I actually overheard someone say it across the cubicles at a major e-commerce company. If people are actively avoiding legal, that’s a red flag.

The survey findings put real weight behind the risk: 11% of revenue has been delayed, and in some cases lost, because of inefficient legal processes. When I first saw that number, I thought, that’s huge. But when you consider how deeply legal is embedded across the business, it makes sense. At eBay, for instance, my team was plugged into everything, passing ideas and initiatives from Australia to Germany to South Africa. If we were slow, the business was slow.

So when you see that 11% figure, imagine what it would mean if you could unlock it, if you could capture revenue faster or prevent it from slipping away entirely. Every leadership team in the world would jump on that opportunity. The risk of bypassing legal is not just regulatory or compliance exposure; it’s missed growth, slowed strategy, and lost trust inside the organization.

The research points to legal teams being overburdened with low-value tasks. What role should automation and self-service tools play in shifting legal focus to more strategic activities?

David Lancelot: The report shows that legal professionals are spending roughly a day a week on administrative tasks. That means highly trained, highly paid lawyers are cutting and pasting between emails and spreadsheets, or digging through inboxes just to write reports. Compare that to sales, HR, or finance, where teams work in centralized systems like Salesforce or Workday. Legal, in many cases, simply doesn’t have that kind of platform. The result is death by a thousand cuts, small inefficiencies that add up to enormous friction.

Where does that friction show up most clearly in day-to-day legal work?

David Lancelot: One of the biggest pain points is triage, figuring out who should handle what. In most legal teams, the most senior lawyers are still manually routing matters: “This one’s for Dave in M&A, that one’s for Mary in entity formation.” No other business function operates that way anymore. It’s inefficient, and frankly, it’s medieval. A good matter management system should do that automatically, freeing leaders to focus on higher-value work.

Another big area is law firm billing. Too often, review and approval become rubber-stamp exercises because nobody has the time to dig into the details. Both of these areas are ripe for automation, and when you implement the right workflows, you can take a massive load off the leadership team’s plate.

Beyond efficiency, what’s the broader impact of reducing this friction on legal’s role in the business?

David Lancelot: When lawyers are buried in low-value work, leadership assumes, “they’re so busy, they must be covering everything.” But the truth is, they’re too busy to cover everything. That creates a cycle of false risk mitigation. As a result, legal lowers its risk tolerance because it doesn’t have the bandwidth to do things properly. The business responds by saying, “Don’t send it to legal, they’ll slow us down,” which actually increases risk.

That’s how legal ends up excluded from strategic conversations, the “not in the room where it happens” problem. By the time legal gets involved, it’s too late. To break that cycle, legal teams need to adopt the same operational rigor that sales, HR, and finance already have. Free up capacity with automation, data, and workflows, and suddenly, legal has the headspace to focus on strategy, collaboration, and long-term value creation.