Rethinking Capacity In Legal Teams

Lessons from the IT sector

In the years after COVID, many IT companies went through a phase that felt uncomfortably like a recession. Budgets tightened. Hiring slowed and then froze. Every function was asked to do more with less.

If you were inside a legal team during that period, this will sound familiar: the work did not slow down. Contracts still needed to be reviewed and negotiated. Renewals still landed with immovable deadlines. Compliance obligations did not ease just because markets were uncertain.

The struggle of the usual models

Even before COVID-era pressures, expectations from legal teams were shifting. Legal was no longer expected to serve as a final risk check, but to exercise judgement, enable deals and operate at the speed of business.

Resourcing models, however, did not evolve at the same pace. Across much of the IT sector, capacity remained tied to people-heavy structures built for stable demand. Headcount scaled slowly and fixed costs were hard to unwind. External lawyers were effective for episodic complexity but not suited to sustained, high-volume work. Traditional outsourcing often fragmented ownership and lacked flexibility.

As volatility increased—through downturns, hiring freezes, acquisitions or sudden demand spikes—these limits became clear. Legal capacity could not adjust quickly enough, constraining teams' ability to apply judgement consistently and operate as strategic partners to the business.

The real problem

The pattern is easy to misread as a performance problem. In reality, it is a design problem—rooted in how legal capacity is structured, scaled and improved over time. Ordinarily, resourcing decisions tend to be reactive and disconnected from long-term improvement. Business-as-usual work is treated as something to be pushed through rather than as a source of learning.

The IT sector experience points to a different way of thinking about legal capacity.

Instead of scaling primarily through headcount or outsourcing tasks in isolation, the focus shifts to ownership of outcomes. Defined bodies of work sit with teams accountable end to end. Flexibility is built in by design. A lean in-house team retains judgement and direction, while execution is structured to absorb volume and variability without constant escalation.

How an 'extended team' builds capability

In practice, this takes the form of a dedicated extended legal team. The idea is to engage external lawyers on contract basis and embed them into the team's day-to-day workflows. These external lawyers work alongside in-house counsel, rather than being treated as outside advisers. This team takes ownership of clearly defined business-as-usual outcomes. Its size flexes as workload rises and falls. Internal lawyers stay focused on risk, strategy and business alignment rather than routine throughput.

The immediate payoff is stability. Work keeps moving even when demand spikes or internal capacity tightens. More importantly, outcome-led ownership creates consistency. Consistency generates data. Patterns soon become visible: which deals move smoothly, where negotiations loop, which deviations recur, and which escalations genuinely need senior attention.

Over time, improvement becomes less reactive and more deliberate. You see contract standards settle. Escalations happen for the right reasons. Playbooks start reflecting realistic negotiating positions. And knowledge repositories stop gathering dust and begin to support day-to-day work.

What began as a capacity solution starts functioning as a capability layer.

An illustrative example

Consider a global IT company that acquired another technology business, adding multiple software products to its portfolio—a familiar scenario across the sector. Contracting volumes rose sharply as customer migrations, renewals, and new onboarding ran in parallel, even as hiring freezes and attrition constrained in-house capacity.

Instead of adding fixed headcount, the company adopted an outcome-driven model. A flexible team of B2B software contracting specialists took ownership of migrations, renewals, and new contracts linked to the acquired products. The in-house legal team retained oversight and judgement.

As the work settled into a rhythm, patterns began to emerge. Reviews became more consistent. Negotiation positions stabilised. Deal timelines shortened. Junior lawyers ramped up faster because they were working within a clearer, more predictable system.

A closing thought

Seen in hindsight, the last few years in the IT sector were a preview of what sustained uncertainty looks like. When pressure builds, organisations reach for familiar moves: hire when possible, outsource when budgets allow, ask teams to stretch a little longer. It works briefly, then the same constraints resurface.

There is another option. It starts with treating capacity as a system that can be designed, not a tap that turns on only when budget appears. Downturns show what breaks first, what holds, and what improves when improvisation gives way to intent. The real question is not whether your legal team can survive the next wave of pressure. It is whether your capacity model is built to learn from it and come out stronger.