Do legal departments need generalists or specialists?

Author: Stephanie Simon-Sommer, lawyer

The law is complex. It therefore sounds logical to employ specialists for employment law, IP and IT law, contract law, data protection and compliance, and perhaps even insurance law. But the legal department can quickly grow to a dozen employees. Are they all fully occupied? With value-adding work? That may be true for large companies. The picture is different for smaller medium-sized companies whose legal department consists of only two or three employees. They employ generalists who know how to handle day-to-day business extremely well. Expanding the legal department would be expensive, and the specialist staff would probably not even be fully occupied. So what should a company do when specialist knowledge is required?

There are various options. Each company must decide which is right for it. The commercial instinct will be to keep the in-house legal team as lean as possible. Where the figures add up, however, an employment lawyer or IP lawyer should be employed in-house. But what if they do not? Or if the company’s corporate lawyer has so much to do that they cannot keep up? That is when legal outsourcing should be considered. It relieves companies in three different ways:

• Many legal departments struggle with the volume of work that pours in every day. This applies to specialists and generalists alike. So why not outsource routine work to a service provider? Taking on this bread-and-butter work is the core of Clarius.Legal’s legal outsourcing offering.

• If specific specialist expertise is lacking in-house, this knowledge can be brought in externally. It is important to establish beforehand just how specialised that knowledge actually needs to be. Depending on the complexity of the task, it may sometimes be advisable to involve specialist lawyers.

• As companies grow, their legal departments grow with them. Where there may initially have been only two generalists, specialists will be recruited or developed internally in the medium term. Legal outsourcing also bridges this transition: specialist or generalist tasks are handled according to the legal department’s needs and internal structure, without anyone actually having to be hired yet.

In each of these three options, companies gain flexibility – and reduce the legal department’s workload. Tasks are then completed with greater motivation and productivity, while employee retention improves.

Flexible and creative: the case for generalists

Special requirements call for equally specialised knowledge and skills. For this reason, the number of specialists in professional life is growing, including in legal departments. Understanding every area of the law would overwhelm anyone. But that is certainly not an argument against generalists.

Generalists stand out for their flexibility and adaptability. They can adjust quickly to new tasks and situations and adapt to unfamiliar roles and working environments. Their strength does not lie in broad knowledge alone: day-to-day professional experience gives that knowledge increasing depth. Generalists therefore consider legal problems from different perspectives and find creative, innovative solutions. At Clarius.Legal, we consequently see ourselves as generalists by conviction.

What we mean is this: to cover all areas of law relevant to companies, our lawyers have a wide range of different areas of focus. Clarius.Legal is a generalist on the one hand, while our employees’ expertise also makes them specialists. Precisely the specialists you need.

Outsource workload peaks with ease

Day-to-day work rarely involves legal high-wire acts; most of it is routine business. So why hire specialists for tasks that generalists can perform just as well? Only for those specialists to become frustrated because they can use their skills far too rarely? The risk is that they leave because they can contribute more and feel more valued elsewhere.

The best way for companies to approach this dilemma is to remain as flexible as possible. In a well-staffed legal department with a range of specialists, more routine day-to-day tasks can be outsourced to external service providers during workload peaks. Strategically important and sensitive tasks continue to be handled in-house – with full attention.

The reverse can work too: generalists in the legal department continue to handle the full breadth of day-to-day business. To allow them to focus on their core work, certain unusual assignments are passed to external service providers with specialist expertise. To a service provider such as Clarius.Legal.