In-House Legal In A Doom Loop?

There is an expression that comes from design thinking that goes something like "Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets." If that holds true, then the system that In-house Legal finds itself inside of must have been designed by some evil genius.

The figures above are from Axiom's 2024 In-house Survey, but you can find similar results from almost any survey on the topic. This is really disturbing. Sure you could say "we're all stressed" and this is a feature of modern life, but these stats have been sadly consistent for a long time now. People are getting crushed by this work and the human toll on people's lives and families isn't insignificant.

Of course, the LegalTech community will rush in saying "we've got the answers to all your problems, if you just buy FacadeTech's AI CLM platform, your troubles will disappear!" Except that's never been the case. 

As more and more billions of dollars are spent on LegalTech, the job stress and burnout rates are going up in lockstep. Coincidence? I think not.

If we go back to systems theory there is a concept that seems to apply to this situation about self‐reinforcing loops, often discussed in terms like “vicious cycles” or more recently "doom loops." Doom loops has been adopted to capture the seemingly inescapable downward spiral that can occur in complex systems, especially in the context of economic and financial crises.

When you consider In-house Legal as a system, and apply the theory a little, there is definitely something "there."

Since this diagram isn't particularly intuitive, let's walk it through step-by-step.

1] We all know the starting position for In-house is a staggering amount of work and that volume isn't going down in the foreseeable future. In addition, Legal gets handed new responsibilities seemingly every year on top of their already large mandate. As an aside, it's been my experience that management-level legal officers have more commas in their titles than anyone else in the company.

2] Proceeding around the cycle clockwise to step 2 we are confronted with the reality that Legal rarely gets meaningful headcount or budget increases, and because of the workloads from the first step, improvements in operating practices are hard to come by as everyone is just "hanging on for survival."

3] You'll notice the term Supportive Technology in this step. Certainly, Legal does get some IT budget, but these purchases do not appear to have helped address the biggest operational challenges faced by legal teams like improving service quality, improving their reputation internally and increasing the value provided by legal to the enterprise. 

4] If the quality of service and value to the company are not being delivered, the next obvious outcome is the nasty nicknames like "the sales prevention department" or "the department of no." Funny, but not when it's at your expense. When legal's reputation gets impugned, it naturally leads to the next step.

5] Reputational concerns borne by a system they have no control over is compounded by Management's relentless pressure to do more with less (or perhaps the same). You could say that being a cost centre is at the root of this issue, but that doesn't tell the whole story. In growth-oriented organizations Legal sometimes has the unenviable task of reigning in growth-based stupidity. Growth for growth's sake is the pathology of cancer, and sometimes Legal has to point out potential risks that chafe Management.

6] At this point, and even if each of the preceding conditions are only partly true, pressure has ramped up again for the Legal team and if history is any guide, things aren't going to get better.

For every year this goes on, the gap between what the business expects from Legal and what Legal is able to provide grows. This is not a people problem. There are tons of highly-skilled, conscientious, professionals on these teams.

As W. Edwards Deming is known for saying, "A bad system will beat a good person every time." The numbers certainly support that.