Extract from Tim Rollins’s article “The Move In-House for E-Discovery Has Accelerated”
In the spirit of educating the legal market on best practices and trends, ACEDS and Exterro recently conducted a survey polling legal professionals on their pre-litigation processes. We developed a short questionnaire covering topics of interest to in-house legal professionals and their counterparts at legal practices and service providers.
The almost 70 respondents represented companies from less than 1,000 to over 100,000 employees, with roles ranging from legal operations and project management to in-house paralegals, attorneys, and even general counsel. With as many departments handling 50 or more matters per year as those handling fewer than 10, one thing for certain is that legal departments are busier than ever–and more than ever before, they’re handling the workload in-house as much as possible.
The past two years have seen a rapid acceleration of the trend toward moving corporate legal services in-house. More than half of respondents to this survey (56%) are performing more than three-quarters of their legal services in-house, and 75% of respondents are performing more than half. That’s a huge step forward from Exterro’s 2020 In-House Legal Benchmarking Report, which saw only 31% and 44% of respondents performing more than three quarters and one-half of their legal services in-house, respectively.
