Corporate legal departments are increasingly turning to alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) to handle growing workloads and manage outside counsel costs, but that adoption remains sharply split by company size. According to the 2025 Law Department Management Benchmarking Report, released by the Association of Corporate Counsel and Major, Lindsey & Africa, large enterprises are leveraging ALSPs at nearly 14 times the rate of their smaller peers.

Legal departments at companies earning over $20 billion in revenue now use an average of 9.7 ALSPs, compared with just 0.7 for departments at companies under $1 billion. The divergence points to more than just budget disparity. While larger departments use ALSPs as strategic extensions of their legal teams—especially for high-volume or repetitive work—smaller teams remain mostly reactive, often too consumed by daily operations to vet or implement new models.

“The adoption gap between large and small legal departments when it comes to ALSPs doesn’t surprise me,” said Stephanie Corey, CEO of UpLevel Ops, a legal operations consultancy. “Smaller teams are typically so ‘heads down’ they don’t have bandwidth to explore new support models, even though integrated partnerships could be tremendously helpful.”

That divide is intensifying under post-pandemic economic constraints. Vince Venturella, associate director at Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, noted the uneven progress. “It’s unevenly distributed. What we are seeing across the board is cost pressure,” he said. Legal departments are deploying more structured approaches—issuing RFPs for high-stakes matters and increasing ALSP usage across lower-risk domains.

The report reveals that legal departments across all sizes averaged 2.6 ALSPs in 2025, up from 1.6 in 2021. But large departments are responsible for most of that upward trend. These teams aren’t just expanding volume; they’re diversifying provider types, drawing on managed services, tech-enabled platforms, and contract attorneys.

“GCs and CLOs are prioritizing alternative resourcing,” Corey added. “The question isn’t whether to use ALSPs, it’s how to use them well.”

By contrast, the report highlights that smaller departments—averaging only two attorneys and three total legal staff—face significant scaling limitations but remain slow to adapt. Many remain unaware that new ALSP entrants are now designed to support leaner teams, offering cost-efficient access without requiring enterprise-scale engagement.

Historically, ALSPs focused on volume-heavy corporate clients to make the economics viable. That model has shifted, but awareness hasn’t kept pace. “Not everyone is aware those options exist yet,” Corey said.

For legal departments ready to test ALSP relationships, Venturella pointed to clear use cases: document review, e-discovery, and contract management remain the lowest-friction entry points. These areas are increasingly served by providers using AI and automation to deliver scalable results at lower cost.