How GCs Can Scale In-House Legal Team Management During Periods of Company Growth

When a company experiences rapid growth, whether that’s an increase in employees or revenue—the pressure on all departments, including legal, intensifies. Leadership demands efficiency, data-driven decision-making and the ability to manage increased complexity. For General Counsels (GCs), this means that scaling their team’s impact isn’t just about hiring more lawyers, and maybe that’s not even an option on the table. It’s about expanding the legal department’s capabilities and influence exponentially to meet these new demands.

This is where intake and matter management platforms become a cornerstone in scaling the impact of the legal team. Without structured systems in place, traditional tools like Jira and spreadsheets quickly become roadblocks, unable to provide the flexibility and insights needed for a fast-growing company. To navigate this transition effectively, GCs must adopt the right technology that allows their teams to scale in a way that meets the demands of rapid growth with minimal change management.  

The Challenges of Rapid Growth for Legal Teams

As companies expand, legal departments face an entirely new set of challenges. The volume and complexity of legal work increases dramatically—from contract management to litigation support. Leadership expects the legal team to be as agile and efficient as other departments yet scaling to meet these demands isn’t straightforward.

For example, consider a company experiencing a 5% increase in headcount within a short period of time. With each new hire comes the need for compliant employment contracts, background checks and onboarding paperwork. This kind of rapid expansion puts immense pressure on the legal department to manage these tasks efficiently, while also balancing other high priority matters like regulatory compliance or ongoing litigation.

At the same time, GCs are tasked with having clear visibility into the department’s workflow, and with the volume of tasks piling up, they have no real insights into what’s happening across legal to identify bottlenecks and reallocate resources effectively, which can ultimately lead to burn out across teams. This transparency is important to help legal remain agile and responsive as the demands from the business intensify.  

Additionally, leadership’s focus on efficiency and metrics is no longer limited to core business units – legal is now expected to operate as a key contributor to business growth. Legal’s ability to streamline processes, deliver results quickly and demonstrate measurable value means it’s no longer seen as just a support function, but as a department that can truly drive business outcomes. This shift requires legal teams to adopt the tools and systems they need to manage workload while providing the data leadership needs to understand the legal department’s impact on overall business performance.  

The challenge lies in managing this growing workload while maintaining clear visibility over what the entire legal team is doing. Traditional tools like Jira and spreadsheets, while familiar, simply don’t offer the structure or centralized insights needed for long-term success. Jira and spreadsheets lack features that provide legal visibility like legal dashboards and analytics software that provide a clear overview into legal department metrics, performance and department value. As legal work becomes more dispersed, inefficiencies multiply, making it difficult for GCs to track progress, manage risks and ensure their team’s efforts align with the company’s broader goals.

To meet these challenges, legal departments must shift from reactive, siloed approaches to a more proactive, integrated corporate legal strategy—one that leverages intake and matter management solutions to provide real-time insights, streamline operations and drive business value.

The Role on Intake and Matter Management Platforms During Growth Periods

As legal departments are expected to scale with the company while managing increasingly complex workloads, intake and matter management platforms like Checkbox become indispensable tools.  

Take the example of a high-growth B2B SaaS company experiencing a 10% surge in new hires due to a corresponding increase in business activity. With more employees onboard, the legal team faces a surge in employment-related matters—contracts, compliance reviews and legal onboarding processes. Simultaneously, the sales team is bringing in more deals, requiring legal to review and negotiate a higher volume of contracts that is helping the business grow in revenue.

In this scenario, without a structured intake process, contract requests pile up, bottlenecks form and urgent requests are likely to go unnoticed. Legal teams as are already stretched thin, which puts them at risk of falling behind and creating delays that have an impact on the entire company. This is where in-house legal team management can make a difference, especially in the form of an intake and matter management platform like Checkbox.

Take for example when employment contracts or sales agreements come in, they are automatically triaged and assigned to the appropriate team members based on workload and expertise. Legal operations can track everything in real-time, with immediate updates on status, owners and deadlines, giving GCs full visibility of the department’s operations.

This is critical during periods of growth, where fast decision-making and effective legal resource management are key. With Checkbox’s real-time dashboards and reporting features, GCs can access detailed, AI-driven insights into legal trends and workloads, helping them plan and make informed decisions. These insights can also be shared with leadership in a clear and compelling way, showing how the legal department is contributing to the company’s broader goals.

What makes platforms like Checkbox even more powerful during growth periods is their ease of use. Unlike traditional in-house legal team management solutions that require.

significant change management, Checkbox is designed for quick deployment with minimal disruption. Lawyers on the team can continue managing their work in their own way while benefiting from the platform’s AI-powered automation. This means GCs can start seeing the impact immediately—reducing inefficiencies, providing better oversight and delivering metrics that matter to leadership without the need for deploying extensive training on how to utilize the platform.

By using a solution like Checkbox, legal teams not only gain operational agility during periods of rapid expansion, but they can also demonstrate the strategic value of legal operations—helping to position the department as a critical driver of business success rather than just a cost center.

In periods of rapid company growth, GCs face the critical challenge of scaling their legal departments to manage increased complexity and maintain alignment with broader business objectives. The shift from reactive to proactive management is essential for navigating this growth effectively. Intake and matter management platforms are pivotal in this transformation, offering real-time insights, streamlined workflows and a centralized view of all legal activities. These platforms can also be paired with legal workflow software to help legal teams better manage their work. Intake and matter management tools centralize incoming legal requests and track their lifecycles from start to finish while workflow eliminates the manual aspects of legal work.  

By leveraging in-house legal software like Checkbox, GCs can not only handle their growing workloads with greater efficiency but also demonstrate their department’s value to leadership in clear, data-driven terms. The ability to align legal operations with the company's strategic goals ensures that the legal team supports and enhances overall business growth. Embracing these advanced tools enables legal departments to turn growth challenges into opportunities, positioning themselves as strategic partners in the company’s success.

To learn more about what Checkbox can do for your legal department, book a call with one of our technology consultants or check out our interactive demo to learn more.