Legal Teams in 2025: Why Agility is the Key to Cost Optimisation.

As we move further into 2025, the legal industry stands at a critical inflection point. Legal departments are being asked to do more—with less. Budget pressures, shifting regulatory landscapes, and the need to operate across diverse jurisdictions have forced General Counsels (GCs) and legal operations leaders to rethink their sourcing strategies. One key theme has emerged from this strategic re-evaluation: agility has become the defining factor for effective legal cost optimisation. 

For years, large globalised Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) were seen as the future. They promised standardisation, centralised delivery, and tech-driven efficiency. But this once-compelling value proposition is beginning to unravel in a world where regional nuance, responsiveness, and customisation are not luxuries, but requirements. 

This article explores how forward-thinking legal teams are moving away from rigid, global ALSP models and embracing more flexible, locally adapted legal service solutions—unlocking both operational efficiency and strategic value. 

The Legal Cost Challenge: Doing More with Less 

Today’s legal departments are under intense financial and operational scrutiny. Corporate priorities are shifting towards value-driven decision-making, and legal functions are expected to keep pace with broader enterprise transformation efforts. GCs are expected to deliver faster, better, and cheaper outcomes, all while managing legal, regulatory, and reputational risk in real time.

Rising Pressure on Legal Budgets

We often hear from clients what appears to be a consistent trend: legal department budgets have either plateaued or declined, while the complexity and volume of legal work have grown. Corporate legal teams face increasing demands in areas such as:

• Regulatory compliance and enforcement, especially across jurisdictions. 
• Contract lifecycle management. 
• ESG and sustainability reporting. 
• Data privacy and cybersecurity obligations. 
• Litigation and internal investigations. 

Against this backdrop, every dollar spent on legal services is being scrutinised. Legal leaders are under pressure to reallocate resources intelligently, not just cut costs. This shift has made it clear that traditional models of cost control—particularly those rooted in centralisation and scale—are no longer sufficient.

The ALSP Model: Strengths That Have Become Weaknesses

When large ALSPs rose to prominence in the 2010s and 2020s, they filled a critical need: delivering legal work at scale, often faster and cheaper than traditional law firms. Their value proposition rested on three pillars:

1. Standardisation of services
2. Centralised delivery centres
3. Advanced technology platforms

For commoditised work like document review, e-discovery, or basic contract management, this model proved highly effective. But as legal work has grown more region-specific and complex, the cracks have begun to show.

Structural Constraints of Large ALSPs

What once made these providers attractive—scale and uniformity—now limits their effectiveness. Their models are weighed down by:

• High fixed costs: Global delivery hubs, extensive management teams, and infrastructure investments create unavoidable overhead.
• Proprietary tech burdens: Custom platforms require ongoing maintenance, upgrades, and amortisation—costs that are often passed on to clients.
• Margin pressure: Many large ALSPs are backed by private equity or structured within multinational consultancies, creating relentless pressure to deliver 25–35% margins.

These structural factors inflate the cost base and restrict the ability of large ALSPs to offer bespoke, jurisdiction-specific solutions.

The “Standardisation Premium"

Legal departments will also begin to question the value they receive, if there is a perceived “standardisation premium”—essentially covering the cost of features, tools, and global delivery capacity that they don’t need or use.

Standardised solutions often require expensive adaptations to meet local legal and business requirements. For example, a contract management system that works well in the UK may need significant rework to address France’s labour laws or Japan’s vendor frameworks—costing both time and money.

The Scalability Trap: Efficiency vs Customisation

At the heart of this debate lies a strategic balancing act between efficiency and customisation. Large ALSPs optimise for the former but often fail on the latter. Their uniform frameworks and processes cannot easily flex to address local legal requirements, regulatory nuance, or language and cultural differences.

Real-World Misalignments

Consider a multinational consumer goods company deploying a global ALSP to manage its compliance training documentation across Asia-Pacific. The ALSP’s centralised team, based in a single offshore location, lacks familiarity with nuanced local laws in Indonesia and Thailand.

As a result, the training materials require multiple rounds of revisions and local input—delaying rollout by three months and significantly increasing the total project cost.

These types of misalignment are not rare—they are becoming increasingly common. They erode the efficiency gains that the ALSP model was designed to deliver. In high-stakes legal environments, such delays and oversights can have real legal, financial, and reputational consequences.

The Rise of Agile Legal Service Models

In response, a growing number of legal teams are pivoting toward agile, regionally focused legal service models. These models emphasise responsiveness, jurisdictional expertise, modular delivery, and outcome-based value. They don’t abandon efficiency—they redefine it.

Characteristics of Agile Legal Models

1. Localised Talent

2. Modular Resourcing

3. On-Demand Scalability

4. Flexible Pricing Models

5. Collaborative Ecosystems

Blending in-house teams, niche legal service providers, and law firms—connected by cloud-based workflow platforms.

Agility is not about chaos or lack of process. It’s about purposeful adaptability—designing legal functions and vendor relationships to respond rapidly and cost-effectively to change.

Strategic Advantages of Going Local (or Regional)

Agile models bring significant, measurable benefits to the legal function:

Perhaps most importantly, regional providers often have more “skin in the game.” They’re motivated to deliver quality and value to build long-term relationships—rather than just fulfil global service quotas.

Designing for Agility: The “Core + Flex” Model

The most successful legal departments are now structuring their teams and vendor ecosystems around a “Core + Flex” model:

• Core: A lean internal legal team responsible for strategic advice, governance, and high-risk work.
• Flex: A network of regionally specialised legal service partners, engaged as needed, to handle jurisdiction-specific or project-based work.

This model offers both cost control and resilience. In volatile regulatory or business environments, the ability to flex legal support up or down without long onboarding cycles or sunk costs becomes a competitive advantage.

Implementing Agile Legal Resourcing: A Roadmap

Transitioning to a more agile legal resourcing model requires thoughtful change management. Here’s a practical roadmap for legal leaders:

1. Assess Your Current Agility

Evaluate your existing legal service model using criteria such as:

• Response time to market or regulatory change
• Cost transparency
• Regional adaptability
• Provider performance consistency

2. Map Core vs Contextual Work

Categorise legal workstreams by strategic value and localisation needs:

3. Diversify Provider Portfolios

Avoid over-reliance on any single provider type. Build a portfolio that blends:

• Traditional law firms for complex advisory
• Agile ALSPs for localised delivery
• In-house teams for business-critical matters
• Tech platforms for efficiency

4. Redesign Performance Metrics

Move beyond “cost per hour.” Track:

• Time to resolution
• Business enablement (legal’s support of key initiatives)
• Risk reduction outcomes
• Client satisfaction
• Innovation participation (co-creation, tech pilots)

Measuring ROI in Agile Models

A common concern is how to prove value in a multi-vendor, agile environment. The answer lies in measuring both direct and indirect return on investment:

Agile models are to known to deliver significant value in sectors that employ implement them, so why wouldn’t this also be true for ALSPs and the legal sector.

The Future of Legal Cost Optimisation

Agility is no longer a “nice to have.” It is now a strategic imperative for legal departments seeking to control costs, manage risk, and deliver value in a volatile business environment.

The future legal department will not be defined by the size of its law firm panel or the global reach of its ALSP. It will be defined by how quickly it can adapt—to a new regulation, a new market, a new business need.

The legal teams that will lead in 2025 and beyond will have one thing in common: they will be agile by design.

Is your legal department designed for agility?

At KorumLegal, we help legal teams across Asia-Pacific build scalable, flexible legal ecosystems. From regional resourcing to legal operations optimisation, our lawyer-led model delivers the right expertise at the right time—without the overhead you don’t need.

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