We recently lost one of our senior counsel who decided to join a law firm (probably an indication about our company). Our leadership has not moved to hire a replacement and is instead making the rest of our ~7 person legal team pick up the slack, despite already being generally overwhelmed (and acts like it’s a reasonable ask). Has anyone been through this before? Is it worth asking for additional compensation with the increased workload, or should I just look for a new job?

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This is a very common occurrence

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We were a 3 attorney team and now have to function as a 2 attorney team. No extra comp to address the fact that we are each doing 1.5 people’s work. It is what it is.

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Business people want data-backed proposals.
(1) Provide data in the current burden, to show a need for another hire or two. E.g., this may be number of contracts handled, contracts per lawyer, increase in contract backlog after the person quit, etc. If contracts is the issue, get buy-in from sales about how much more they could sell if you could process the contracts faster.
(2) Salary needs to be handled differently. You aren’t going to get a 12.5% boost because you are doing things with 7 instead of 8 lawyers. And it cuts against your “we need another person” argument. But you can point to attrition, hours team works versus law firm hours, law firm pay. Or show how they have not kept up with inflation over the past 5 years.

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And this really needs to come from the GC. If you don’t have their support and commitment to push for these, then it is definitely time to look for a new job.

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Just look for a new job.

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You do less. Have discussions about priorities so you can cut out stuff you probably never needed to be doing.

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This. Make a list of the most time consuming tasks across the entire legal org and try to identify things that could be deprioritized. This might mean that the company takes on some legal risk (eg, maybe sales are empowered to accept certain redlines without a lawyer’s review), or some business work will have to be deprio’d

I worked for a startup where everyone in Legal was fired or left, over the course of a few months, except myself, and I ended up doing 4 people’s jobs until they laid me off too. So this is generally not a good sign. Early in my career a colleague was laid off and her entire workload added to my plate. So this had happened to me twice now.

Unfortunately Legal is often seen as a cost center where management tries to do more with less. It is not fair to the attorneys.

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I would also lean towards looking for a new job. Many companies have a disconnect between legal and the business departments. Oftentimes, in those companies, there are also a lot of disconnects between the business department themselves. There’s just not a good understanding of the work to be done. I hope you find a better company that values its legal team.

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This happened to my team recently as well. I’m looking for a new job

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Find a new place.

your company sounds cheap. get a new job

For all those saying look for a new job: isn’t what OP has described a fairly commonplace occurrence? I am in a similar position and not looking to leave because I want to get several years of experience at one place under my belt.

Interesting…in my case, it is the GC who resigned and has not been replaced.

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