Aligning the constellation: making the legal ecosystem work together

Aligning the constellation:
making the legal ecosystem work together 

Everyone can see the gap between law firms and in-house teams. The harder truth is that both now face changing demands they must meet in each other, while the ground beneath them moves. 

By Janet Taylor-Hall (CEO, Cognia Law), Claire Chapman (Co-founder & Director Albi Consulting, NED, former General Counsel and Chief People Officer) and Matthew Layton (NED, former Managing Partner, Clifford Chance) 

This article covers: 

• Why the old "firms versus in-house" story has run its course
• The shared challenge sitting beneath the familiar complaints of a system that has never had to align before but now does
• What cross-industry alignment requires, and where to start

There's a conversation that's been running in legal circles for years now, and most people in it could recite the lines by heart. The law firms aren't listening. Fees keep rising. In-house teams aren't being heard. The two sides drift further apart. It’s broadly true and certainly reflects the heartfelt experience of many general counsels.  Repeating it is arguably no longer useful. Everyone can see the gap and recognizes that the gap needs to close. So the more interesting question is what sits beneath it. 

Two separate things tend to get bundled together here, and they're worth prising apart. 

The first is the law firm's challenge. The traditional model has been criticised for years, and much of that criticism has merit. But the reason it persists isn't simply stubbornness. The firms that might change it can't yet see a different model that delivers an equally compelling commercial outcome. It's one thing to accept that a model should evolve; it's quite another to walk away from something highly profitable for an unproven model. That's a genuine bind, not a failure of nerve. 

The second is newer, and it belongs to the general counsel. Their own model now needs to change too, not just how they instruct firms, but how the in-house function itself operates. This is the part many GCs are wrestling with, and it's tempting to assume they face similar dilemmas as the firms. We'd push back on that. GCs have always had to design systems across people, processes and technology to meet a moving target: budget cuts, a new CEO with a different risk appetite, fresh legislation, expansion into new markets. Redesigning to meet changing needs is something the role has done since it existed. The difficulty now isn't a lack of know-how. It's that the basis of the change itself keeps moving. 

The shared challenge beneath the complaints   

Put those two together, and the real issue comes into focus. This isn't the firms failing the GCs, or the GCs abandoning the firms. It's a shared challenge: two sides trying to meet each other's needs at the very moment both sets of needs are changing and the ground beneath them is shifting. The firms are working out what a commercially viable new model looks like. The GCs are redesigning a function to sit atop it. Neither can solve their half in isolation, because each is part of what the other is trying to design around. 

That's why this can't be fixed on a one-relationship-or-one-organisation basis. The alignment that matters here isn't an individual sorting out their own patch. It's broader across the industry: firms, in-house teams, alternative providers, and technology partners all have to move in ways that fit together rather than pull apart. Seen that way, the familiar complaints are symptoms of a system that has never really had to align before, now being asked to. 

The work of alignment  

One way to picture it is as a constellation. Around any legal leader sits a wider community, or ecosystem: their own team, stakeholders across the business, outside firms, technology providers, and the other partners they rely on. The useful exercise is to look at that constellation honestly and ask whether it's aligned, whether everyone's pointed in roughly the same direction, or whether it's a set of players each optimising for themselves and hoping the whole thing holds together. Across the industry, if you look with clear eyes, it isn't. 

Aligning it is leadership work, and it rarely happens by declaration. No constellation falls into line because someone announces a new strategy. It happens because leaders keep bringing people back to a shared purpose, meet them where they actually are, surface the fears they carry, and find common ground before asking them to move. Those are skills borrowed as much from campaigning and community-building as from law, and they matter more, not less, when nobody can promise where things will be in a year. 

Starting with your own house   

Here's the part that requires some bravery. It's easy, from the in-house seat, to make this a story about what the firms should do differently. But if in-house teams want firms to change, they have to be willing to change how they engage them: how services are bought, how firms are briefed, what gets rewarded. In-house teams hold more power in this relationship than they tend to use. 

The most effective change we've seen comes from clients who convene their firms, alternative providers, and technology partners in the same room and say plainly: "This is what good looks like, and this is how I want you to work together." That's a very different act from complaining that the ecosystem is broken. It's taking responsibility for the part of it you actually control. 

Part of that is being clearer about where different work belongs. Not everything needs the most expensive brains in the market. Reserve those for the genuinely hard, high-stakes questions, and find better models for the large volume of important-but-repeatable work that sits underneath. A useful discipline, borrowed from the UK NHS, is to ask everyone in the system to "operate at the top of their licence": to spend their time on what only they can do, and to delegate, automate or partner on the rest. Applied honestly, that principle redraws many relationships. 

It also means widening the circle of people you turn to. Lawyers, understandably, default to asking other lawyers. But the changes that work most often involve bringing in perspectives from outside the profession: people who think about process, data, design and human behaviour differently. Widening that trusted network is one of the simpler ways to introduce the diversity of thought this moment needs, and one of the most underused. 

Connective tissue, not another silo    

What the ecosystem lacks isn't more players, but something to hold the existing ones together. Someone has to help the constellation line up: to bring the design thinking and delivery capability that lets firms, in-house teams and technology partners work as one rather than past each other. That connective role is the one we set out to play at Cognia, and it only works from a particular starting point. The firms are not the enemy, the in-house team isn't the enemy, and the technology is not a magic answer. The opportunity is in getting them aligned. 

Commitment is required here. It's comfortable to keep observing the gap. It's harder, and far more valuable, to pick one relationship in your constellation and start the work of aligning it, properly. That's where the change actually lives.