Legal work gets done by people. Increasingly, it also gets done by technology working alongside them. Get that mix wrong, and even the best legal team will struggle.

That is exactly what we have been hearing. So far, across Elevate’s Global Knowledge and Networking Series, more than 450 General Counsel and Chief Legal Officers have answered the same question for us: what is the biggest barrier preventing your legal team from operating at its best? Three issues emerged consistently, and together they point to a single problem: the way legal resourcing works today, who is doing the work, and what technology supports them, is no longer keeping up with the demands on in-house teams.

1. Specialist Skills, on Demand

When a specialist question lands, the reflex is to pick up the phone to an external firm, and for high-stakes, strategic, bet-the-company work the General Counsel we speak to are unanimous that this remains the right call.

External counsel are indispensable and the best firms are partners no in-house team should be without. What these conversations reveal is the gap underneath that top tier of work. A specialist question lands that needs a specialist answer but not a partner-led mandate. A defined piece of regulatory work needs real depth but not a multi-month engagement. A privacy notification needs someone who has done it twenty times before, for two weeks, not two years.

As one General Counsel at a FTSE-listed business put it to us, ‘I do not need a firm for this, I need a person. The right person, for the right amount of time’. We are hearing this consistently across sectors and regions, and what General Counsel are increasingly looking for is a third option sitting alongside their firm relationships. One brilliant specialist, embedded in the business, available for as long as the work demands, scaling up and down with the matter. The market has never structurally offered this, and the volume of specialist work landing on in-house teams, in regulatory change, privacy, employment, IP and sector specific compliance, makes the absence of it harder to ignore each year.

2. The Workload Spikes Quietly Define Your Team

The second pattern our network describes is the surge problem. A transaction, a regulatory shift, a launch, a dispute, the work arrives in waves and the team is expected to absorb it. The Chief Legal Officers we speak to are candid that neither of the conventional responses really works. Whilst hiring permanently of course has its merits, the time to hire means that by the time the new joiner is found, hired and up to speed, the spike is yesterday’s problem.

Instructing externally fills the gap but at a price point that gives most General Counsel pause for work that did not warrant it. The result, as one General Counsel described to us, is a team that ‘lurches between overwhelmed and underutilised, with nothing sensible in between’. Capacity is no longer just a headcount question; it is an operating model problem, and most legal functions are running on an architecture designed for a slower, more predictable era.

3. Retention is Compounding the Crisis

This is the issue most legal leaders we speak to underestimate, and the one most likely to define whether their team is still standing in eighteen months. The pattern is consistent: talented lawyers are stretched beyond capacity, covering work outside their expertise, ground down by relentless pressure with no relief in sight, and they eventually leave. When they do, the institutional knowledge, the relationships and the commercial judgement built up over years of knowing the business leave with them. Several Chief Legal Officers have told us, in almost identical terms, that retention is no longer an HR problem sitting downstream of the work. It is a resourcing problem sitting upstream of it, and it compounds every other challenge our network raises.

What Leading General Counsel are Doing Differently

Across these conversations, there has been a consistent theme: technology-fluent lawyers can no longer be an add-on. Jordan Furlong has observed that the AI-native generation now entering the profession can help accelerate the transition to AI-integrated legal environments. The General Counsel and Chief Legal Officers getting ahead share a pattern: a permanent core of generalist commercial lawyers who know the business, a flexible specialist layer deployable in days, AI-fluent practitioners woven through both, and resourcing treated as a strategic discipline rather than a procurement decision triggered by crisis.

A Complimentary Review of Your Resourcing Structure

If you are reassessing how your legal team is resourced, we offer a complimentary review of your legal resourcing model, benchmarked against what leading General Counsel are doing today. We will share a clear, candid view of where your model is working and where it can evolve to deliver more flexible, scalable, and cost-effective resourcing.

To learn more about Legal Talent, contact us here.