- Escape the “hamster wheel” of reactive legal work by strategically prioritizing matters instead of treating all work the same. Stop using expensive law firms as default overflow and focus your team on what actually drives business value.
- Alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) now deliver sophisticated legal services at a fraction of law firm costs. They bring specialized expertise and technology capabilities that would be prohibitively expensive to build in-house.
- Legal teams are now sprinting to adopt AI. Custom bots transform how departments manage information, freeing attorneys to focus on strategic work that requires human judgment.
GCs know this cycle all too well: overloaded in-house teams handling everything, while expensive law firms take on routine overflow that should never have left the building. The result? Ballooning outside counsel costs, exhausted internal teams, and no capacity for strategic work.
CEO and founder of UpLevel Ops, Stephanie Corey, says, “this cycle plagues legal departments of all sizes. Most teams find themselves overwhelmed with work, unable to distinguish between truly important matters and routine tasks that could be handled more efficiently.
But forward-thinking legal teams are now breaking free from this trap. They’re shifting resources, partnering with specialized flex talent providers, and leveraging customized tech tools.” Discover how they’re doing it in this article.
Why do legal departments keep spending money on outside counsel while their teams still burn out?
When every request, urgent or routine, gets the full attorney treatment, budgets and legal teams suffer.
Lawyers want to give 110% to everything, Stephanie explains, “so as work comes in, they don’t really think about the work. They just do it.”
The result? Overworked legal departments and skyrocketing outside counsel bills. Let’s break it down:
But how do you escape when your team is caught in this cycle of reactive work? The answer isn’t entirely eliminating outside counsel. It’s about “rightsourcing,” being strategic about when and how you use law firms, flex talent, and your in-house team.
“Pretty much every legal team does need to rely on outside counsel at some point,” Stephanie acknowledges. The key is determining which matters truly warrant premium rates. The best in-house teams approach resourcing like triage:
When firms handle routine overflow work, inefficiency can creep in.
External lawyers are typically way more risk-adverse than your internal lawyers. They don’t know the business as well.
Stephanie Corey, CEO and Founder of UpLevel Ops
This shows up in practice when law firms handling routine contracts redline everything.
Excessive scrutiny of minor issues can create unnecessary friction with business partners who just want to close the deal. The law firms are just doing their job, of course, but without a deep understanding of your business context, they can’t distinguish between critical issues and those that can be reasonably accepted.
This guide is designed to help. You’ll learn how to assess your current state, uncover inefficiencies, and identify practical ways to align your team’s resources with the work that matters most.
How to Make Your Legal Department Work Smarter: A Step-by-Step Guide
Hourly billing compounds issues by rewarding inefficiency. “There’s a disincentive to be efficient,” Stephanie explains, “and that creates problems from a finance perspective.”
Stephanie suggests structuring deals with law firms using a phase-based approach to pricing. Under this model, organizations pay different amounts based on how a matter progresses — one price if it follows a standard path and different pricing if it takes unexpected turns. You can even build in success fees tied to outcomes. In contrast to hourly billing, these arrangements provide budget predictability while aligning the firm’s incentives with your goals.
The financial benefits of this approach are substantial. You can save anywhere from 20 to 50% on these matters.
Stephanie Corey
The legal vendor landscape has transformed, and gone is the basic outsourcing of yesterday. As Stephanie explains, ALSPs now offer comprehensive solutions combining expert talent with powerful technology, creating effective alternatives for legal departments of all sizes. Here’s how they do it:
And the financial advantage of using ALSPs? When comparing them to traditional law firms, Stephanie calls the difference “night and day: It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than using law firms to do the work.”
When it comes to tech investments, one size doesn’t fit all legal departments. The right technology stack depends on your department’s operating model and strategic objectives.
“A lot depends on your level of maturity and what your goals are,” Stephanie explains.
Teams doing mostly in-house work should prioritize intake systems and matter-tracking tools that showcase legal’s contributions.
You have to be able to show what the legal team is working on. As a general counsel, you have to tell that story, or you will never get another resource given to you.
Stephanie Corey
Departments that are heavily outsourcing need robust e-billing and external matter management systems to control costs and monitor performance.
The smartest legal departments structure their tech investments around three levers:
Without this structure, technology adoption often fails to deliver ROI.
But remember: Even with the best product, implementation has to happen the right way, or people won’t use it. Technology success hinges on integration and adoption, not just selection.
While previous legal tech advancements brought incremental benefits, AI represents something entirely different. Thomson Reuters’ 2024 Report on the State of the US Legal Market notes this growing impact of GenAI on the legal industry.
At a legal event last year, Stephanie asked how many legal professionals were using AI for work. About half raised their hands. When she repeated the question just weeks ago? Every hand went up.
“If I can save myself five hours on tasks…it’s a game changer,” she emphasizes. Tasks that once consumed entire days—consolidating feedback, identifying patterns across documents, analyzing complex data—now take just minutes.
What truly excites Stephanie is the emergence of smart AI adoption: customized AI tools built specifically for legal workflows.
“I have an AI note taker that sits in all of our meetings,” she explains. These specialized bots store meeting transcripts, organizational charts, and company goals, creating an institutional memory that’s always accessible.
“At any given point, I can query this thing and say, wait, remind me, how are they structured again? What tools are they using?”
These digital assistants recall details from conversations that happened months ago—information that would otherwise be forgotten or buried in folders.
Specialized AI assistants can significantly reduce your in-house team’s workload and free attorneys to focus on valuable work. The question is no longer whether to adopt these tools but how quickly your team can integrate them into daily workflows.
The GCs leading the charge aren’t just cutting costs—they’re building a legal operating system that aligns people, processes, and partners to business priorities. That’s how you create capacity for the work that matters most — and finally escape the reactive cycle.
Don’t let inefficiency drain your resources and hold your team back from working on valuable strategic tasks. Paragon Legal’s experienced flexible attorneys integrate seamlessly with your team, delivering specialized expertise at a fraction of traditional firm rates.
Ready to find out how our flexible talent solutions can help you build an agile and cost-effective legal department? Let’s talk.
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