LOD report: In‑house teams redefine roles amid mounting tech pressures

Lawyers On Demand (LOD), a Consilio company, released the findings of its annual global survey: “The Integration Imperative – Optimising the Legal Engine of the Future.” For the sixth consecutive year, LOD surveyed legal, risk, and compliance professionals across the globe. This year, 678 professionals responded, with the report focusing on key trends within the in-house legal community.

The key findings of the report are:

• In-house teams are redefining their role. 71 per cent now identify as strategic business partners, overtaking the traditional specialist legal expertise role (62 per cent). This new positioning is up from 21 per cent last year and just 4 per cent the year before, raising the question of whether operating models have kept up.
• Workload is still the defining pressure for in-house teams (56 per cent), but it now sits just above growing responsibility for technology decisions (54 per cent). Coupled with teams’ growing strategic role, the findings suggest that they are under more pressure than ever before.
• Emerging tech opportunities and leadership vision rank equally as drivers of change and innovation (both at 46 per cent), suggesting this is not just bottom-up experimentation but top-down expectation, adding further pressure.
• AI and legal technology adoption is widespread but shallow and disjointed. Intelligent tools are being layered onto infrastructures that were not designed for integration at scale, resulting in 46 per cent of in-house respondents reporting operating within fragmented systems, 48 per cent relying on manual workarounds and 34 per cent experiencing duplicated data across multiple platforms. These findings suggest limitations on visibility and efficiency, while increasing the risk of inconsistency.
• Flex talent is being used, but not yet fully embraced. Over half of in-house teams (52 per cent) are using it, often in embedded or managed models, yet most are not treating it as a long-term strategic lever. This creates a tension as workload and transformation demands continue to increase.

Simon Harper, founder of LOD, commented, “In-house teams are redefining their mandate faster and more decisively than ever. This expanded mandate requires legal teams to simultaneously reflect on the context of their functions whilst managing ever-increasing workloads. This is not an easy combination. The most successful teams will be those that can find the right balance – bringing AI and other tech systems together whilst embracing the vision of their best human talents, strengthening governance and creating flexible workforce structures. Reframing these competing priorities requires attention to the big picture and relationships with shorter term metrics – clearly acknowledging the trade-offs that we all need to make.”