The "More-for-Less" Challenge: Does It Exist?
The “more-for-less” challenge has been around for several years now and seems to be widely accepted by both external and in-house lawyers. However, there is not much data available to verify this assumption.
That is why in 2015 the Bucerius Center on the Legal Profession (Bucerius CLP) carried out a survey to test the “more-for-less” hypothesis (more details in Hartung/Gaertner, The “more-for-less” paradox, in: Business Law Magazine No. 1, 3 March 2016, p. 21 et seq.). We asked 700 in-house lawyers from companies based in Germany to complete a short questionnaire, of these 700 nearly 10 % participated in the study. What we discovered is that only one part of the hypothesis is true; 80 % of in-house lawyers stated that the legal department’s workload grew (+3 to +10 %) or grew significantly (more than +10 %) during the last 3 years. This demonstrates that legal departments today have to provide more legal services. When we asked about the available resources (both internal and external), one third of participants answered that the budgets for external counsel, as well as the number of in-house lawyers, remained almost the same. When it comes to internal resources however, we observed growth; in our study, 40 % of the participants answered that the number of lawyers in their team grew or grew significantly during the last 3 years. In a different study, carried out by the German Magazine Juve Rechtsmarkt in 2014/2015, 442 executives from the areas legal, IP, compliance and tax were asked the same question, of these, 60 % answered correspondingly (see Juve Rechtsmarkt 02/2015). When it comes to external resources, nearly 40 % of in-house lawyers in our study stated that budgets are on the decrease. In a nutshell, we cannot find enough evidence to support the “more-for-less hypothesis”, at least not in Germany. That is why we assert that the term “more-for-less” is not completely correct, and should be changed to “more-for- the-same”. The expression “more-for-the-same” also captures the greater need for efficiency. We will further use the expression “more-for-less” when we describe the past, going forward we will use the “more-for-the-same” expression.3