We are honoured to share this article, created with the insight and expertise of Renee Meisel – Chief Executive Officer, UnitedLex and her coauthors— Adam Rouse, Tamra Moore, Kassi Burns, and Olga Mack—and published by Stanford Law (law.stanford.edu).
Litigation is not disappearing, but the people who lead, draft, and direct it are changing quickly. Empirical studies show that corporate legal departments have steadily grown their litigation management responsibilities over the past decade (Annual Litigation Trends Survey, Norton Rose Fulbright (2025)).
For many years, litigation sat firmly within the domain of law firms. (Wald, Eli, Getting in and Out of the House: Career Trajectories of In-House Lawyers, Fordham Law Review, Vol. 88, No. 1765, 2020 (June 22, 2020)). Corporate legal departments traditionally played a reactive role—approving strategies, reviewing documents, and paying hourly invoices. However, based on numerous recent conversations with in-house legal leaders, legal operations professionals, and litigation experts, a different reality is taking shape. In this new environment, in-house counsel is increasingly producing the first draft, standardizing its litigation processes, and redefining how outside counsel fits into the workflow.
AI, analytics, exemplar libraries, playbooks, and modular document builders are more than just tools. They are driving a structural transformation. Litigation is becoming modular, data-driven, and coordinated by in-house teams who seek more than cost savings. They want uniformity, transparency, and strategic leverage. This piece highlights five major trends identified in our qualitative research, offers predictions on how they’ll influence legal practice, and identifies research questions that deserve further exploration. It then presents a model for understanding how litigation workflows and relationships with outside counsel are likely to evolve in the coming years.
Read the full article HERE
