A survey finds corporate legal departments in Asia uniquely stressed and unhappy. finews.asia takes a look.

It is hard to find a financial services institution that is truly satisfied with its internal legal function.

Amid the constant mumbling on the front line and the regular fits of exasperation from senior managers, what always comes through is an inability to deliver anything on time – whether an internal paper, a decision, an approval, or even a concurrence. Moreover, anything complicated or unusual is apt to be sent out to an external legal counsel already drowning in work – ostensibly.

They often add even what seems to be totally unnecessary impediments to an already fraught situation. Then, to top it all off, a select number, always known internally, have a habit of using committee meetings as some kind of debating practice. Everyone recognizes it for what it is, even employees completely devoid of working political antenna. Just a rearguard action to get comments labeled with their abbreviated initials in the minutes for something they didn’t fully support – or reject.

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On Thursday, a survey was distributed to the media in Singapore that collated responses from 300 general counsels based in Singapore and Hong Kong. It was conducted by Coleman Parkes in early 2023 for Axiom, an on-demand international legal services provider with a regional franchise. 

If nothing else, it almost exactly mirrors what the front-line and management always suspected, just in reverse, as it looks at it all from the point of view of internal legal departments, or general counsel, as they are typically called in Asia.

It seems that more than one-third of APAC general counsels «feel handcuffed» by the lack of expertise in their own teams.

Not Knowing Much

According to them, the deficits lie in the following areas: labor and employment, regulatory and compliance, real estate, new/emerging areas, data privacy, and cyber security. 

A pertinent question at this juncture might then be – what do they know? I mean, wasn’t it the legal departments the world over that dropped regulatory compliance like a hot potato starting in the early 2000s when it looked like things would get too hard?

But it gets better.  They also predicted what they won’t know in the future. Here new/emerging areas went from fourth to first. That was followed by banking/finance, data privacy, cyber security (mentioned twice), intellectual property, and, again regulatory and compliance. All this seemingly confirms the internal corporate views of the legal function. The minute you hire one, they ask for more lawyers.

Ebb and Flow

The ostensible lack of expertise, both present and future, confirms much of the dissatisfaction banks tend to experience with their legal departments, with the survey confirming that the need for knowledge ebbs and flows.

«The expertise required for a product launch last month, for example, is not the same as that required to address employment issues now, nor will it be the same to resolve the data privacy issues of the workforce of tomorrow. As a result, hiring permanent headcount often only addresses past needs,» the report stated.

Given all this, it is of little surprise that general counsels in Asia are also not all that happy. According to the survey, almost half are not satisfied with where they are now, and nearly all (95 percent) feel stressed.

Culture Issues

But then the survey seems to veer into a detailed portrait of the ills of individual general counsels. Most (60 percent) say they have a poor work-life balance, almost half (46 percent) have issues with the culture of the company they work at, 39 percent believe their workload is «unmanageable» while 33 percent maintain they have insufficient budgets for staff needs.

Looking back at the first paragraphs of this piece, it is all starting to make sense. Not only are they not liked by the front line and executives, but they also chafe at being hunkered down, quasi-coopted, as full-time employees.

Rescued by AI

The question is whether all this will change in a world of AI chatbots and big tech. It is not yet clear although an article in «The Global Legal Post» (freely accessible) maintained that more than half of in-house lawyers backed using ChatGTP for legal work.

The same article cited a Thomson Reuters report that found that 11 percent of them were already using it in internal corporate departments, although only 5 percent in private practices were.

That could be one way out of the current conundrum, despite the risks of generative AI tech, something that was also highlighted in the piece as well as in a highly publicized incident where ChatGTP used fake court cases («Legaldive», freely accessible). 

The Way Out

But failing that, three-quarters of general counsels in Asia Pacific see another way out. 

Using flexible talent providers and consultants to make their teams leaner and minimize costs while limiting the use of external law firms. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Axiom offers up the services of one of its legal consultants at the conclusion of the survey.