More obligations, the same team: New global data reveals why entity compliance is under structural strain

If you work in entity compliance and governance , you already know the pressure has changed shape. The filings keep coming, obligations are expanding and your team is likely the same size it was two years ago — if not smaller.

For the first time, there's global data to prove it.

Diligent's Global State of Legal Entity Compliance Benchmark Report surveyed over 300 company (corporate) secretaries, general counsels and legal ops leaders across six regions. What emerges is a function under structural strain — and a clear picture of what it takes to get ahead of it.

The weight of entity compliance has reached a breaking point

The scope of the company secretary and general counsel role has expanded. More entities, more cross-functional responsibility, more regulatory complexity. But the systems, structure and resourcing behind these teams haven’t kept up.

The numbers make it clear:

• 74% of governance professionals say their scope has expanded in the last two years
• 63% say their workload has outpaced team growth or their team has been scaled down
• 52% are operating with just one or two dedicated entity management resources

Most teams are still managing entity data in spreadsheets, Word documents and SharePoint (55%), with only 33% using a dedicated platform.

That leaves 52% spending six or more hours a week on filing tracking, deadlines and record updates — time pulled away from legal judgment and strategic work.

Half your peers nearly missed a critical deadline last year

When teams are stretched thin and working from fragmented data, obligations fall through the cracks or come dangerously close to it.

51% experienced a near-miss last year, where an entity obligation almost went unmet. A further 15% preferred not to disclose.

In most cases, it comes down to visibility. Only 1 in 5 teams have a near real-time view of their entity compliance obligations. This leaves most organizations making governance decisions without a clear, current view of where they stand.

As one group company secretary puts it:

"Your job is to help give them that thread, make sure they see the full picture and around the corners. Presuming they've got what they need without asking is dangerous."

— Group CoSec, Utilities (UK), FTSE 100

You're running a strategic function but you're not sure the board sees it that way

Company secretaries and general counsels have become the connective layer of the enterprise — now working more closely with risk and compliance (59%), IT governance (56%), beneficial ownership (56%) and AI governance (31%).

Yet the recognition gap remains stubbornly wide:

• 56% see themselves as strategic advisors to the board
• Only 17% believe leadership fully agrees
• 52% say leadership underestimates the complexity of entity and subsidiary governance

Without leadership recognition, funding doesn’t follow, and teams are left doing more with the same limited resources. The report gives you the data you need to change that.

93% of teams use AI but most don't fully trust it yet

AI is already part of the workflow but for most teams, it’s still supervised and not fully trusted.

The blockers to fuller AI use in entity management aren't about the technology itself:

• 45% cite data quality as their top barrier
• 43% cite lack of trust in AI accuracy
• Only 36% are comfortable with AI completing actions without human approval.

With 64% naming AI governance and oversight as the most critical skill for the next three years — ahead of regulatory change management and strategic risk assessment — the function is evolving faster than most teams are being equipped for it.

Across responses, one thing is consistent: AI only delivers value when entity data is clean and structured. Without that, even strong AI capabilities don’t hold up in practice.

How leading teams are scaling legal entity compliance

The data from the benchmark shows us that we are at an AI inflection point, there's a new model emerging that will support this function to execute at scale with the teams they have.

What separates leading teams isn’t whether they use AI or not — it’s how they operate around it.

The model that stands out is Approve-to-Act: humans set the rules and stay accountable, while technology carries out the work.

In practice:

1. Define and delegate: Set scope, rules and responsibilities
2. Review and approve: Humans stay in control of key decisions
3. Execute and track: Technology completes filings, updates and workflows, with a full audit trail

This is how modern entity compliance functions scale without increasing risk. It’s also the model behind Diligent Entities — bringing structure, visibility and AI-assisted workflows together, while keeping decision-making firmly with the team.

See how your function compares

Use the Global State of Legal Entity Compliance Benchmark Report to benchmark your function against peers, build the business case for funding and understand what the shift to smarter entity management requires.

Download the full report