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The Hidden Cost of Context Switching

BX

Bo Xiang

January 5, 2026 · 3 min read

GC turned software engineer

In the high-stakes environment of an in-house legal department, being busy is often mistaken for productivity. However, for many General Counsel and Legal Operations leaders, the feeling of running in place is not a result of a heavy caseload alone. It is often the byproduct of a silent, systemic drain: context switching.

Consider a typical Tuesday morning: A General Counsel (GC) receives an urgent Slack message regarding a redline on a high-value contract. To address it, they must:

  1. Check Outlook for the historical email thread.
  2. Open Salesforce to verify the account’s commercial history.
  3. Log into the CLM to pull the initial draft.
  4. Navigate to SharePoint to find the latest approved template.
  5. Return to Slack to provide a status update.

This cycle repeats dozens of times a day. Each switch feels quick, but the mental overhead adds up fast. Research from the University of California, Irvine indicates that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully refocus on a task after an interruption. For midsized legal teams managing hundreds of matters, this fragmentation doesn't just slow down work; it fundamentally erodes the department's capacity to deliver strategic value.

The Anatomy of Context Switching in Legal Operations

In-house legal work is uniquely vulnerable to this kind of constant switching. Unlike many business functions that operate within a single source of truth, legal teams are often the connective tissue between every department, forced to navigate a fragmented tech stack to gather context.

The Typical Legal Request Journey

An NDA review is rarely simple when the data is siloed. The journey often looks like this:

  • Intake: A request arrives via an informal Slack message or a forwarded email chain.
  • Context Gathering: The attorney hunts through fragmented email threads to understand the why behind the request.
  • Research: They jump into a CRM like Salesforce to pull vendor details or contract history.
  • Execution: The actual drafting happens in Word, while version control is managed in a CLM or shared drive.
  • Approval & Signature: Routing for sign-off happens via a separate e-signature tool or back in the email abyss.

Why Legal Teams Are Particularly Vulnerable

Legal work requires deep focus. Analyzing a complex indemnity clause or a regulatory change is not a shallow task. However, because the legal department is a service center for the entire business, attorneys are constantly pulled into quick questions.

Each interruption forces you to stop, reset, and get back up to speed. When you are bouncing between 4-7 systems a day, it gets harder to stay focused and easier to miss details.

Quantifying the Productivity Drain

To understand the scale of the problem, move beyond anecdotes. A 2022 Harvard Business Review analysis found that the average digital worker toggles between applications and websites nearly 1,200 times per day. For a legal professional, where accuracy is paramount, the cost is even higher.

The Math Behind the Problem

Let’s look at a conservative calculation for a 5-person in-house legal team:

Daily Context Switches

50 per attorney

Refocus Time per Switch

4 minutes (Retrieval + Reorientation)

Daily Loss per Attorney

200 minutes (~3.3 hours)

Total Team Daily Loss

~16.7 hours

Monthly Capacity Drain

~333 hours

In practice, this can add up to the equivalent of roughly two full-time employees of lost capacity each month (assuming ~160 hours per FTE month). According to the 2025 Bloomberg Law Attorney Workload Survey, attorneys already spend roughly 2 out of every 8 hours on administrative tasks like project management and information retrieval. Context switching is the primary engine of that wasted time.

The Hidden Costs Beyond Time

The drain isn't just financial; it’s operational and psychological:

  • Quality Degradation: Cognitive fatigue leads to missed details in contracts.
  • Increased Risk: When an attorney has to manually move data from a CRM to a CLM, the risk of copy-paste errors or version-control mishaps skyrockets.
  • Attorney Burnout: Constant interruptions prevent "flow state," leading to the high burnout rates seen across the industry.

Why Traditional Solutions Fall Short

Many legal departments try to solve this by adding another tool for each problem. Think a CLM, an intake tool, and a research platform. Over time, this often turns into a patchwork of systems.

Instead of a streamlined workflow, the team ends up with 6-10 separate logins and disconnected workflows. Integration promises made during the sales cycle often fail to materialize, or require expensive, custom-coded middleware that breaks every time an API updates.

Manual workarounds, like tracking matters in a massive Excel sheet or using Slack as a de facto project management tool, only exacerbate the problem. These makeshift systems become dumping grounds where information goes to die, forcing attorneys to spend even more time searching for the final version of a document.

What an Integrated Approach Looks Like

The solution to context switching isn't adding more tools. It is reducing the number of places work has to happen and keeping context attached to the matter.

What Modern Legal Infrastructure Looks Like

  • Unified intake and context: A single request channel that captures the ask and the business context together.
  • Built-in integrations: Contract and matter work should pull key details from systems like Salesforce or NetSuite automatically, so people are not copying and pasting information.
  • Communications tied to matters: Messages and emails related to a contract should be easy to find right next to the document and key decisions.

Conclusion: The Path Forward

Context switching is not an inevitable part of being an in-house lawyer. It is a symptom of an outdated system design. For midsized legal departments, the ability to reclaim 30-40% of their team's capacity is the difference between being a bottleneck and being a strategic partner.

The question for General Counsel today is no longer whether you can afford to invest in integrated workflow tools. Given the quantifiable cost of fragmentation, the real question is: Can you afford to keep losing 16 hours a day to the space between your browser tabs?

If context switching is consuming a meaningful share of the team’s week, it is worth mapping where work and approvals actually happen today. The gaps usually show up quickly.

Ready to cut down on the back-and-forth? Book a demo with Sandstone.

Works Cited & Research Appendix