October 2025

The resourcing mistake that’s costing your team.

By Jahnna McKeag

It’s no secret that in-house legal teams are stretched. A 2023 survey of General Counsels in Australia found that 85% are managing increased workloads of greater complexity. Many say their teams lack the expertise or the capacity to keep up with factors like cyber risks, data privacy, and financial crime. Adding to the challenge are constrained budgets, heightened business expectations, and internal headcount restrictions.

When pressure builds and deadlines close in, law firms are often the first port of call. What comes back is technically sound, carefully argued, but theoretical. Someone still needs to finalise the contract. Chase the signatures. Update the policy. Talk to the stakeholders. The advice sits in a folder while your team drowns in the execution, often making the workload problem worse, not better.

This is familiar territory for most legal departments.

Too often, I see law firms brought in to cover capacity gaps when their structure is really designed for advice, not delivery. That’s not a criticism, it’s their model. Advisory firms give advice. Sending business-as-usual matters to a law firm means your team still has to execute everything, except now they have the double whammy of also translating external advice into internal action. And if you’re engaging firms in this way, it means you’re paying a premium for something that creates more work, not less.

The alternative, keeping everything in-house, leads to bottlenecks, burnout, and declining patience across the business as work slows down. Neither model handles volume or pace particularly well. And yet, it’s an issue I see happening again and again.

What the work actually needs

The mistake isn’t outsourcing. It’s outsourcing the wrong thing to the wrong resource. Most legal work doesn’t need another opinion; it needs someone to do the work.

I’ve found resourcing decisions become clearer when you stop and ask: what does this matter actually need?

Some legal work calls for Brains: strategic judgment on complex or high-risk issues where you need an independent view. Others call for Arms: execution to get contracts over the line, implement a new policy, or complete a project. But often, the gap is simply Bandwidth: enough capacity to keep business-as-usual moving while people are on leave or big projects with competing priorities stretch the team.

Law firms are built for brains. That’s their value. However, most in-house teams don’t have a ‘brains’ problem; they have an arms and bandwidth problem. They need people who can step in and do the work, not produce another document about it.

That’s where secondments come in.

What actually works

Seconded lawyers become part of your team. They work from your office, use your precedents, sit in your stakeholder meetings, and operate within your risk framework. The result is faster delivery, less rework, and genuine relief for permanent staff.

Employed on a project or short-term basis, seconded lawyers’ real value is supporting periods of high demand, project implementation, or extended leave cover. Thus reducing pressure without increasing permanent headcount, and giving internal teams the space to think, not just react.

I’ve placed countless secondees, and I see many becoming part of a longer-term model. Many secondments that were meant to last three-to-six months end up going for 18 to 24 months. Not because of scope creep, but because they become invaluable to the team.

Matching the resourcing to the work

There’s a clear role for external firms. High-stakes matters, technical specialisations, and moments requiring independent advice all benefit from that model. But not every matter fits that brief.

What’s often missing isn’t legal expertise, it’s the capacity to get through the volume and see tasks through.

That’s why secondments work. They offer experienced legal professionals who can step into your environment and contribute immediately. No billing in six-minute increments. No translation layer between advice and action.

When external advice is needed, the engagement works best when scoped tightly and executed decisively. Set expectations clearly. Ask for a recommendation, not a research paper. Assign internal ownership. The fewer resources you burn internally, the more value you retain.

Rethink what you outsource

General Counsels are balancing more demands than ever with leaner teams and tighter budgets. That means resourcing strategies have to support both output and sustainability.Most legal teams don’t have an advice problem; they have an execution problem, and hiring more advisors won’t fix it.

At Front Foot, we partner with legal teams to provide seconded lawyers and retainers that integrate quickly and deliver real results. We also provide strategic advice when needed and help ensure it doesn’t stall at the point of implementation. In other words, we bring the brains, arms, and the bandwidth.

I see too many legal teams stuck in a loop, defaulting to a resourcing model that creates more work instead of less. The capacity crisis facing Australian GCs is real: tighter budgets, more complex workloads, and expertise gaps that another document can’t fill. When your team is stretched, the question worth asking isn’t “who can advise on this?” It’s “who can actually do this?”