CLOC’s 2025 State of the Industry report, drawn from the 2024 Harbor Law Department Survey, collected responses from 186 organizations across more than 15 industries and 14 countries. It found that 83 percent of departments expect demand for legal services to continue growing, and that 63 percent name workload and resource bandwidth as the challenge they cite most often. The same report put median legal-department headcount at 77 full-time employees. The median legal-operations function was 5 full-time employees, unchanged since 2023. Thirty percent had an AI tool in use, up from 18 percent in 2023. Those are global survey cuts. They are not a count of Zurich vacancies, and a four-lawyer bench in Zurich should not copy a 77-person department’s job description.
On 2 March 2026 CLOC released the 2026 State of the Industry report, based on the 2025 Harbor survey of 135 law departments with median revenue of $13 billion. Only 32 percent expect attorney headcount to increase. The focus areas CLOC named were technology strategy (80 percent), financial management (72 percent), and outside-counsel and vendor management (62 percent). A Zurich general counsel who cannot add lawyers, and who still sends the overflow to an independent without an invoice record, is describing a legal-operations brief.
The Zurich-specific load is supervisory, and it is dated. FINMA’s 2025 annual report lists 245 supervised banks and securities firms, 192 supervised insurance companies, and 1,600 licensed portfolio managers and trustees. Assets under management at licensed financial service providers were CHF 8,772 billion as at 31 December 2024. Those figures are national. They are the employer universe a Zurich Group Legal department sits inside, not a headcount of Zurich legal-operations jobs. In the same reporting year FINMA conducted 113 on-site inspections at banks, 43 at insurance companies, and 20 in asset management. The report says that from the start of 2026 the authority would increase the duration and depth of on-site inspections while holding quality constant. An inspection that lasts longer asks for an inventory, a testing record, and an escalation path. That file is an operations product.
FINMA Circular 2023/1, Operational risks and resilience — banks, entered into force on 1 January 2024. It applies to banks, securities firms, and financial groups and conglomerates. The circular expects operational resilience under margin no. 102, and the requirements in margin nos. 104 and 111, within two years of entry into force. The two-year window is the difference between a policy on a shared drive and a control a supervisor can sample. Writing the inventory, the tolerances, and the test record is operations work. The legal judgment on what the circular requires stays with the general counsel.
The same 2025 supervisory chapter records a finding that is already an operator’s job. At several large institutions that had outsourced key activities, FINMA assessed the arrangements against Circular 2018/3 and identified a need to improve the outsourcing inventory, the control activities, the reporting, and the internal escalation. A vendor list that a general counsel keeps in memory does not survive that sample. The person who keeps the inventory current is a head of legal operations, a vendor manager, or both. The finding is national. It is not a statement that every Zurich bank failed the test.
Parliament adopted the Investment Screening Act on 19 December 2025. SECO says entry into force is expected in 2027, and that no applications can currently be submitted. A Zurich general counsel who staffs a filing team in 2026 is early. A Zurich general counsel who uses 2026 to decide which acquisitions would be notifiable, and who owns the checklist, is on the SECO timetable. That checklist is a procedure. It is not a reason to hire a fourth transactional lawyer and call the inbox a control.
Sartori has worked the Zurich in-house market for 5 years. Over three years the desk closed 12 in-house searches, at 93 percent completion, on a typical timeline of 4 to 7 months. A counter-offer arrived on 31 percent of them. The median from written offer to acceptance was 15 working days. The interview cohort for the city is 250 structured interviews. That cohort is one number, used on every Zurich page that quotes interviews.
