A recent Deloitte survey found that Chief Legal Officers (CLOs) are pivotal in navigating complex strategic challenges, leading enterprise-wide and legal function transformations and crafting strategies to leverage GenAI. The findings also indicate that as the role of the CLO continues to expand, two important skills can aid in the CLO’s success: the CLO’s ability to 1) collaborate with other executives to solve enterprise-wide challenges, and 2) maintain open and trusted communications with those leaders.

The researchers asked 460 legal executives about various enterprise-wide and legal function-specific topics and they were grouped into four geographical clusters: Australia, Canada, the United States, and Europe to better understand where legal functions around the world are aligned—and where they are not. According to the results, across all geographies, CLOs are instrumental in driving organizational change. Seventy percent or more of surveyed CLOs reported leading or jointly leading at least five enterprisewide transformation initiatives for their organizations. Legal entity rationalization ranked as the top enterprise-wide initiative CLOs are leading or jointly leading except in Australia, where it ranked second.

When asked which legal function transformation efforts were extremely challenging, CLOs reported the following challenges most often:

• United States and Europe: Obtaining adequate funding
• Australia: Inability to generate value from technology solutions
• Canada: Inadequate staffing levels

Ninety-five percent of surveyed CLOs reported their organizations have already engaged with Generative AI (GenAI) on some level, and 99% are either implementing or planning to implement GenAI initiatives. However, survey results suggest there is work to be done when it comes to aligning on GenAI strategy and initiatives:

• 27% of CLOs believe their organizations have the skills to execute on the mission and vision for GenAI initiatives.
• 15% of CLOs believe the roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities are clearly defined for GenAI initiatives within their organizations.

Furthermore, CLOs cited communication failure as the greatest barrier to building trust within their organizations. Other barriers included misalignment and low transparency. To better communicate the benefits and capabilities of new technologies for more widespread adoption, CLOs reported they are allocating 43% of their legal function technology budgets to change management and training.

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Source: The 2024 CLO Strategy Survey