Are you looking to build a business case for increased headcount?

If you are being asked to prepare a business case in support of your request for additional headcount, make sure you highlight the role that legal plays in supporting strategic goals for the organization and the potential risks and value leakage by not having the in-house expertise at hand to support those efforts. 

In the absence of limited (or no) increase in investment, are you considering how existing technology can achieve some of the same outcomes?

Technology is an area that in-house legal teams are investing in, according to the survey data.  Understanding what technology you have access to already and how that might be able to support some of your automation or efficiency projects can be a great first step. If you haven’t already, connect with your IT support teams to discuss what problem(s) you are trying to solve and whether there might be an existing solution that can be deployed (or even modified slightly) to accomplish your goals. Don’t forget that process improvements in and of themselves can provide some quick and easy wins. 

What are you doing to help demonstrate the value of the law department? 

Utilizing spend data can be a great way to demonstrate how the law department is achieving cost savings, but there may be other metrics that may be important to you as a department that help to demonstrate your alignment to the organization's goals. But unless you have the systems in place to track this data, it can often be a challenge to retrieve and synthesize. Reporting on more complex metrics such as work type and volumes can not only provide insight into the work being done by the department, but also provide data to inform robust forecasting and decision making.