Generalists’ Shrinking Role In Legal Departments

According to a Gartner article analyzing trends in corporate legal departments, non-lawyers will replace one in five in-house generalists by 2024. The change is driven by bigger workloads, flat budgets, and efficiency concerns, and requires implementing legal technology on a greater scale. The last big innovation in legal departments was the creation of the Legal Operations role. Gartner predicts new roles in coming years, including legal project managers and data scientists employed within the legal function. Resource decisions for various in-house functions will increasingly involve decisions about whether to rely on non-lawyers and service providers other than law firms. Smart general counsel will build tech skills within existing staff, borrow expertise from other internal functions and hire from novel talent pools. Another prediction: By 2024, legal departments will have automated 50 percent of legal work related to major corporate transactions.