5 IP Tips for Your In-House Legal Department: How to Do More with Less

You can only identify potential savings if you understand what your in-house legal department is spending to achieve a given outcome or objective at present. Monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) will help, as will ensuring your budget is detailed and accurate enough for your needs.  

More broadly, understanding where your big costs fall is key. Is your legal department spending large amounts of money on external legal counsel? If so, might you make some savings there, especially when it comes to more routine matters?  

When assessing your in-house legal department's expenditure, it makes sense to prioritize the low-hanging fruit. Some matters cost a lot of money for good reason: challenging, unusual legal issues are likely to require external counsel, and while you might be able to lower some of those costs, tasks that do not require legal advice are likely to be your best opportunity for savings. A good place to start is to look at the routine elements of your in-house legal work. Small savings on a large volume of activity will likely have a larger, more sustainable impact and, in general, are also less risky.

Many in-house legal departments now use requests for proposals (RFPs) for their legal services procurement process. This has several advantages for your in-house team. It allows you to refresh the approach of your external legal counsel to client service and pricing by putting them in competition with alternative suppliers, which could generate cost savings and service improvements.  

It gives respondents to the RFP the opportunity to suggest things that you may not have thought of yourselves, which may help you improve outcomes. And, perhaps most importantly, putting out an RFP forces you to define the scope of work you require clearly. This can prevent ‘mission creep’ and ensure that you only pay for what your in-house legal department needs.  

Perhaps the most effective way of saving money while improving performance is to consider alternatives to external law firms, or indeed to your own in-house legal team, for managing certain elements of your legal work. IP renewals, recordals, search, watch, and docketing are examples of tasks where a specialist IP provider, such as Questel, may prove less costly and more efficient than managing work in-house or through an external law firm.  

There are several advantages to using an IP services provider to support how you manage your trademark portfolio, for example. Its foreign agent network may well be more cost-effective than your own, due to the high volume of work they manage; it will have experience dedicated to trademark management as a core activity (whereas for your in-house team it may be peripheral to the core goals and objectives); and, a specialist provider is likely to be more cost-effective, since the business model depends on systematizing processes efficiently to achieve the correct result.  

More generally, using a specialist IP service provider enables you to increase work volume at times of high pressure without having to add headcount to your in-house legal department.   

One potential danger of analyzing where you can make cost savings and improve performance is that you treat it as a one-time endeavor. While this will save you money in the short term, an approach that brings oversight and discipline to all your costs and activities as an in-house legal department continuously is likely to ensure you can maximize efficiency and achieve your goals and objectives in the longer term.