The Great Resignation and Its Impact on Legal Department Contract Workflows & KM

The focus of general counsel over the past few years has been on reactively responding to the daily business needs and crisis after crisis. Even companies that have made it through a tumultuous two years are consumed with the increased daily business demands and pressures their in-house legal team faces. They've spent the past few years scaling their teams and hiring more senior lawyers and subject matter experts, and many of those lawyers are now overwhelmed with their workloads. Some also are struggling with returning to the office full-time and prefer the convenience of fully remote work.

Unfortunately, few GCs have invested during this time in proactively building their legal teams' workflows and processes, creating backup repositories, centralizing learnings and best practices, creating succession plans or implementing effective technology solutions. Many resisted hiring a legal operations professional to help the department with these initiatives, someone to put processes in place that might offset the loss of legal talent in an environment of rapid inflation and a hot job market causing increased pressure on wage levels.