In-house dispute management - What does best practice look like?
Deep dive on litigation management strategic successes by in-house teams who are paving the way.
In-house dispute management - What does best practice look like?
Deep dive on litigation management strategic successes by in-house teams who are paving the way.
According to our research, legal teams typically prioritise creating processes for:
Gainining visibility of claims across the business
Dispute/claims escalation
Tracking litigation related data
“We do ultimately have a defined process with our customer relations team where there are smaller value claims with customers. Certain types of those disputes will get escalated either into the privacy team or the legal team (...) beyond that though most of the disputes that we have come up on a much more ad-hoc basis so therefore on that side we don’t have a defined process to follow because we haven’t historically needed one."
Usmaan Amin, Head of Legal, Trainline
Have established an internal program for assessing the merits of a claim
Rely on law firms for assessing the merits of a claim.
A few legal teams use quantitative modelling with their CFO and rely on a dedicated recovery team.
Merits of claims assessment: When it comes to assessing the merits of a claim, 67% of legal teams who have established an internal program, conduct the analysis themselves internally and 57% rely on law firms for this assessment.
Key performance indicators (KPIs)
There’s an increased frequency of legal teams adopting granular goals and performance metrics for commercial and transactional work. However, KPIs are not typically in place for litigation matters, with 70% stating that they have not yet implemented such KPIs.
Only a small number report to the board on litigation-related KPIs (14%).
Of those who do track KPIs relating to litigation, the top three stated were active court cases (21%), law firm litigation costs reduction (14%), and dispute resolution outcomes (13%). Legal teams who have KPIs in place report on the impact and value to the organisation.
That said, we identified a trailblazing 3% of legal teams who track litigation damages recovery targets.
“It’s useful not just for the legal team in measuring SLA for the business, but it’s actually useful for the business as well [to] identify areas where there may be gaps in our customer journey.”
Belinda Lucas, Head of Legal, Verisure
A look at what in-house teams have planned for 2023
Looking forward to this year, just shy of half of respondents are planning to implement some form of litigation management initiatives.
For those reading this who have yet to implement any litigation management initiatives, you aren't alone. 30% of in-house legal teams have not implemented any formal litigation management initiatives whatsoever.
Only 22% intend to improve the visibility of claims across the business, and 18% plan to address the tracking of litigation-related data.
Litigation management initiatives legal teams are planning to implement in 2023
Litigation budgets are generally low - in line with General Counsels’ recurring mandates from CFOs to keep costs low and pursue settlement strategies over long and costly proceedings.
1/3
One third of legal teams lack complete visibility on their legal spend whether locally or globally.
Total UK annual litigation spend
Total global litigation spend
When asked about the aggregate value of total claims being defended in a typical year, for the majority of respondents this was less than £100k, (43%) - with most saying total claims are in the range of £100k-£1m.
Aggregate value of total claims defended in a typical year
