Diligent's Global State of Legal Entity Compliance Benchmark Report 2026 surveyed more than 300 Corporate Secretaries, General Counsels and legal operations leaders across six regions.
The findings: 74% say their scope has expanded in the last two years, and 63% say workload has outpaced team growth — in some cases because the team has been cut. The mandate has grown. For most teams, the operating model underneath it has not.
That disconnect showed up throughout the benchmark. The message from practitioners was remarkably consistent: today's governance challenges are being managed using processes and systems designed for a much simpler environment.
The modern Corporate Secretary sits at the intersection of governance, risk, compliance and board oversight.
As organizations grow more complex, the entity data governance teams manage has become critical to stakeholders well beyond the register itself. Risk and compliance teams need it. Finance needs it. Internal audit needs it. Boards need it.
59% of governance professionals now work more closely with risk and compliance, 56% with IT governance, and 56% with beneficial ownership. The entity record has become a working source of truth for how the business understands its own risk and accountability.
Yet despite this growing strategic importance, many teams remain consumed by administrative work. Fifty-five percent still manage entity data in spreadsheets, Word documents and SharePoint; only 33% use a dedicated platform. Fifty-two percent spend six or more hours a week on filing tracking, deadlines and record updates — hours pulled directly from legal judgment and strategic work.
One of the benchmark's clearest findings is the gap between how Corporate Secretaries see their own role and how they believe the board sees it. Fifty-six percent see themselves as strategic advisors to the board. Only 17% believe leadership fully agrees, and 52% say leadership underestimates the complexity of entity and subsidiary governance.
As one Group Company Secretary at a FTSE 100 utility put it in the benchmark's interview program:
"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."
The strategic value is there. It's buried behind manual processes, fragmented information and reporting cycles that eat the time needed to surface it. Capacity, not visibility, is the real constraint: when governance teams spend their days gathering and validating information, they have less time to provide the insight, foresight and enterprise-wide perspective boards increasingly need.
Governance professionals describe the modern challenge in different ways: no single source of truth for entity data, growing pressure from boards and regulators, increasing cross-functional requests, difficulty scaling without adding headcount, uncertainty about the role AI should play in compliance work.
These read as separate problems. They share one root cause: an operating model built around disconnected systems, spreadsheets and institutional knowledge. The work has evolved faster than the tools supporting it, and the numbers show where that gap lands. 52% run their function on just one or two dedicated resources, and 51% had a near-miss last year, where an entity obligation almost went unmet.
The most advanced governance teams aren't solving every challenge individually. They're addressing the foundation beneath them. Three themes stand out among more mature organizations.
Theyestablish a single source of truth. Entity data lives in one central system that supports governance,compliance and reporting across the business, replacing the multiple repositories most teams still juggle.
They shift from periodic reporting to continuous visibility. Stakeholders can pull accurate, current information the moment they need it, without waiting for the next quarterly rebuild. That frees governance teams to spend less time compiling reports and more time delivering insight.
They create governance frameworks for AI from the outset. Leading organizations define what AI can do, what requires human oversight, and how accountability is maintained, before AI ever touches a live filing.
The next stage for the Corporate Secretary is stewardship of one of the organization's most important strategic assets: its entity data. That's a bigger mandate than processing more compliance work, faster — and it's the direction the benchmark shows the function is already heading.
As boards demand greater visibility, regulators expect stronger governance, and businesses look for faster answers, the value of accurate, connected entity information will only increase. The organizations that pull ahead will be the ones that move beyond disconnected spreadsheets and adopt operating models built for how governance actually works now.
The role of the Corporate Secretary has already evolved. The real question isn't whether it will keep evolving, it's whether the systems supporting it will keep up.
The benchmark makes one thing clear: Today's Corporate Secretary is no longer just the chronicler of the entity estate; they're becoming its operator. That shift only happens when the operating model underneath the role changes with it, and that starts with putting AI to work on the register itself.
That's where Diligent Entities AI comes in.
Human-led and Approve-to-Act by design, Entities AI keeps you in the driver's seat while it absorbs the manual work eating into your week. Ask it a natural-language question (who's appointed where, which filings are due, registered addresses of your global entities ) and get an instant, cited answer pulled straight from your own corporate record, no digging through registers required.
Upload a board resolution or appointment letter, and AI reads it, extracts the appointee, role and dates, and pre-fills the update for you to review and approve with a single click
Bulk-upload documents, and AI classifies, validates and prepares them for your review — no re-keying data line by line.
Every output is labeled AI-generated and paired with a source citation, so nothing gets committed to the record without your sign-off. Entities AI operates in a closed loop, using only a customer’s corporate records to generate responses. Because that data is not used to train the model, it enhances security and helps reduce hallucinations.
The result: the hours currently lost to reconciling registers and chasing filing confirmations go back to the board conversation, where the Corporate Secretary is meant to operate.
You already know the mandate has outgrown the model. See what running it looks like with Entities AI. Request a demo.
