Steve Jobs once said that: “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people”.
This truism has come through in many of our recent conversations with General Counsels (GCs) and heads of legal, as they finalise their plans for 2025.
Despite the excitement over the potential productivity gains from legal AI, most in-house leaders are more focused on team dynamics and people engagement as the clearest pathway to lifting productivity.
This includes managing career development and pay expectations, encouraging lawyers to return to the office to foster collaboration and striking a balanced approach to internal, seconded, and external legal resources.
ALSPs on the rise
For many sectors, seconded lawyers are an important part of the resourcing mix – helping to backfill short-term resourcing gaps, supporting special projects and managing peaks in service demand.
There are now over 30 Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs), providing seconded legal services to Australian in-house legal teams.
This increase in the number of secondment agencies is likely to stabilise pricing, which will come as a relief for those GCs who absorbed lawyer pay increases during the post-COVID inflation spike.
As the market matures, some secondment providers are looking to specialize in specific industries rather than trying to be all things to all people. This too should help GCs by enabling them to partner with agencies who know their industry and are better-placed to find the right skills and experience.
As always, the key to success for secondment agencies and the in-house teams they support is how effective they are at finding and attracting legal talent. This applies for permanent and secondment roles.
Junior and mid-level lawyers, in particular, are harder to recruit for secondments, because they tend to prefer the stability of well-paid, permanent roles in uncertain economic times. Successful secondment businesses will do better at bridging the gap to permanent employment i.e. via longer secondments, continuity of work and career development opportunities, whilst selling in the advantages of experiencing different industries and in-house cultures and improved work and family balance.
Hybrid work arrangements under review
Senior lawyers, who are more prevalent in the secondment space, tend to enjoy the flexibility of legal secondments and have increasingly sought to negotiate hybrid work arrangements at the start of their engagements.
With greater family and personal commitments, they have come to enjoy the benefits of working from home, at least part of the time and often see limited benefits in returning to the office full-time.
GCs and heads of legal are more frequently raising the importance of having lawyers in the office, even seconded lawyers. They see the value of in-person collaboration, mentoring, and team-building and if given the option would rather have someone who is prepared to come into the office. How this tension unfolds in 2025 will be interesting to observe.
