Cut Intellectual Project Cost And Reduce Inefficiency: What Can In-House Legal Teams Do?

Undertaking benchmarking exercises will help you identify potential areas for saving and increasing efficiency. With IP, for example, conducting an Intellectual property cost management exercise will allow you to easily identify where you’re paying too much for external legal services and how you could improve the performance of your external counsel network.  

Similarly, understanding what you typically pay to your external legal counsel for a particular matter will help you understand where you might make savings while improving efficiency.  

Lastly, it’s worth looking within your legal team as well. Are your staff members performing not just effectively but in the most efficient way? If you have well-paid staff performing basic tasks relating to legal matters, you may be able to generate better efficiency by focusing on higher-value tasks and finding alternatives for the more basic elements.  

Once you’ve identified potential areas for increased efficiency and intellectual property cost reduction, there are various things you can do to act on them.  

If you’ve conducted an intellectual property cost management exercise, either in-house or with an external partner, you can approach your external counsel network and ask them to provide a new pricing proposal.  

With external counsel, you could consider requests for proposals (RFPs) for future activity to ensure you have the most efficient and cost-effective solution going forward.  

You may also identify areas in which you are currently using external counsel unnecessarily. For many tasks, especially those related to IP management, specialist IP providers could take on a large part of the work with equivalent or increased efficiency and at a lower cost.  

One overlooked element of making your legal team more efficient is your ability to measure the performance of those working in the team.  

Having robust and useful key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure progress is helpful, but it can be challenging to assess performance.  

Some metrics by which you might choose to measure performance include:  

• Turnaround Times: How long does it take for a specific person to perform a specific task? Targeting your staff effectively on this metric should help improve efficiency.  
• Quality Assessments: Instituting a review system for specific work, in which work quality is assessed by another team member or an external partner, may help improve performance.  
• Ask Other Departments: Involving other areas of the business to assess the performance of your legal team may provide a quick and efficient way to identify potential improvements you can make.  
• Institute Scorecards: Having written records of how well the legal team’s tasks have been achieved can help monitor improvements and identify areas for further development. One job of a legal team is to manage legal risks. Instituting a scorecard system in which risk is identified and measured against the actual performance of a given piece of work will provide an excellent insight into where you can improve.  
• Control Intellectual Property Cost: Assess how well your staff is paid, and what you achieve from them in return for those salaries. Paying above industry average may, paradoxically, be cheaper than paying low rates, because you are more likely to retain staff and save the recruitment and training costs associated with new team members. But there is always a balance to be struck, and understanding typical rates for your industry is key to this assessment.