Lawyers Working Backwards

Abstract

It is important to take inspiration from outside your own organisation. In-house lawyers need to be commercial to succeed. Bringing these ideas together, lawyers at Barclays are adapting and adopting some of the key techniques used by the world’s most successful companies, both to fundamentally change how we approach legal work and to become trusted partners for our clients (internal and external). Implementing new ways of working within in-house legal teams, developed from business practices, is not new. However, success to date has been varied, with many lawyers having experienced the challenges of efforts to improve, for example, large-scale attempts to map complex processes, often done poorly and leading to little change.