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''[[Friedrich Nietzsche|Thus began Zarathustra’s down-going]].'' | ''[[Friedrich Nietzsche|Thus began Zarathustra’s down-going]].'' | ||
When you’ve been spending money like it comes out of a tap, it isn’t hard to look like a hero. You just turn off the tap. It helps when deal flow is flat-lining and the litigation portfolio is winding down by itself, but credit where it is due: the consultants cut the legal spend by twenty-five percent, annually, over four or five years. That’s a lot of hero. Suddenly the heroes at first [[chief of staff]], then the | When you’ve been spending money like it comes out of a tap, it isn’t hard to look like a hero. You just turn off the tap. It helps when deal flow is flat-lining and the litigation portfolio is winding down by itself, but credit where it is due: the consultants cut the legal spend by twenty-five percent, annually, over four or five years. That’s a lot of hero. Suddenly the heroes — at first “[[chief of staff]]”, then the “legal [[chief operating officer]]”, and latterly “[[legal operations]]” — had the same kind of hiring mandate the legal eagles had fifteen years earlier. | ||
It is a deft re-brand: “chief of staff” sounds like, and was, a kind of retired military adjutant who ran the [[CPD]] program and no-one took seriously. “Chief operating officer” sounds a more organised attack on the freedom and profligacy of the professional class. But “[[legal operations]]” sounds like a factory: a long-term industrial undertaking that is intended to displace the artisanal weavers and will be here for good. | |||
But | In this way the great retrenchment of in-house legal began, and for ten years kept pace. Much low-hanging fruit was picked. But eventually, legal spend was collared, and opportunities to eek out cost dried up. | ||
Note the narrative sweep here: industrialisation. Scale. Control. Margins. The approach to the problem of legal comes from a very particular perspective viewpoint. The accountant’s. It is quantification, not evaluation. The question is never what to do, or why to do it, but how cheaply to do it. The full beam of analytical, reductive rigour is trained on that single question: ''how can we do all this for less and less money''? Focus has become laser-like on the [[delivery of legal services]]. How they should be delivered, with what tools, out of which segments, at which cost. | |||
None of this addresses the difficult questions the credit crisis plainly posed. | |||
== What’s ''really'' wrong with in-house legal == | == What’s ''really'' wrong with in-house legal == | ||