The Reinvention Agenda
The pressure on legal teams keeps building - more work, greater complexity, and higher expectations. And as our recent Global Survey Report shows, the capacity to innovate and implement transformative large-scale tech, like AI, simply isn't there.
To move forward, leaders are finding ways to reclaim their team's time and capacity. They are recognising that small, targeted reinventions are making a measurable difference to workload pressures.
Whilst in-house teams are work-rich but time-poor, we've made getting started easier with The Reinvention Agenda. Read on to see what this entails and how you can easily put into place for quick results.
The Reinvention Agenda
Reinvention 1: Spot the friction
Free up time by improving how work gets done, reducing delays, and making space for more strategic impact.
Action points:
- Look for repetitive, manual, or misaligned workflows that are slowing your team down
- Choose one to fix - and then automate, streamline, or template it.
Expected results: Reclaimed time through more efficient workflows. Your team will feel empowered and you'll get more done with less friction.
Reinvention 2: Optimise spend
Whether facing tight budgets or fortunate enough to be awarded more, move towards smart spending. Take the opportunity to reassess how your resources are used and where true value is coming from.
Action points:
- Understand your spending by mapping time, tools, and people to business outcomes
- Reduce low-value work through automation or readjusted delgegation
- Focus spend on solutions that cut time, reduce risk, or shift legal into more strategic work
Expected results: Smarter use of resources freeing up capacity, delivering clearer impact, and a team that drives measurable business value.
Reinvention 3: Protect legal's strategic role
Our Global Survey Report uncovered strategic decision making has become a new and pressing challenge for in-house leaders. As a result, it's more important now than ever to avoid slipping back into reactive mode. Protecting your position as a strategic business partner doesn't take a massive overhaul - it needs regular, small check-ins to keep things on track.
Action points:
- Priortise business planning sessions and help shape the agenda to align legal with commercial objectives
- Build preventative strategies that include horizon scanning and pre-empting risk
- Simplify engagement with stakeholders by using clear, business-focused language, staying proactively visible, and connecting legal input directly to strategic goals
Expected results: Faster decision-making, stronger risk mitigation, and sustained influence in shaping business strategy and transformation. Reactive work will reduce, reclaiming the team's time to work proactively and drive higher-value outcomes.
Reinvention 4: Adapt your talent strategy
As the nature of legal work evolves, traditional team structures are being tested. In response, look to flexible resourcing as a practical solution that offers capacity and capability.
Action points:
- Audit capacity gaps to understand where delays occur or opportunities are missed
- Use experts strategically to handle complexity, overflow, or innovation projects
- Blend your core team with flexible legal talent to achieve scalability and add niche skillsets when needed
Expected results: A responsive, future-ready legal team that can handle day-to-day demands and is equipped to grow with the needs of the business.
Reinvention 5: Improve workflows
Change in the legal industry is being shaped by small, targeted reinventions instead of by larger technology transformations. Prioritise fine-tuning processes and workflows to meet workload demands and boost efficiency.
Action points:
- Focus on adopting tools that solve specific workflow challenges and deliver measurable ROI
- Improve efficiency through small, incremental process enhancements and automation, for example contracts, to generate quick wins with minimal disruption
Expected results: A restructured way of getting work done more efficiently, reclaiming the team's capacity for future larger-scale tech transformation.
What next?
Legal teams can't transform what they don't have time to rethink. Taking time to act on each of these small, targeted reinventions will help immediately reclaim the time and space leaders need to think clearly.
Ready to rethink how legal work gets done? Get in touch with our team to explore how we can help you drive meaningful reinvention.