Dear Legal Department, how do you manage your overload during the Corona era?
Legal departments including sole in-house legal counsels need assistance from time to time, with their ongoing work.
This can be due to a certain expertise which the legal department does not have (such as technological procurement agreements), and due to overload which occurs during the end of quarter, maternity leave, or a large strategic project such as M&A, public offering or another large transaction.
What are the possible solutions today?
Prioritization and focusing only on some work
The challenge- sometimes the low prioritized tasks require the most legal attention.
For example, a simple agreement with a marketing leads' provider, may impose legal challenges that need to be checked, such as confidentiality, who owns the leads, can the provider send the same leads to the competitor and of course, anti-spam and privacy regulation.
The result- the company faces exposures which it is not aware of and which are not managed.
Recruiting a new team member to the legal department
The challenge- hidden unemployment at times when there is no justification for fixed full/partial employment.
In addition, a lot of uncertainty exists these days and it is expected that this uncertainty will continue for another 6-12 months because of the Corona, so recruiting a new team member with fixed costs at such times is something which many companies will be reluctant to do.
Working with the external law firm
There are some challenges:
External firms usually work on an expensive hourly rate basis, and so the legal costs will increase or alternatively, the company will limit the times it will address the legal firm to maintain low legal costs.
Furthermore, the external firm does not have the intimate knowledge and familiarity that the in-house legal counsel has.
The firm does not know the company in depth, the products, the mode of operations and the way the various departments work with each other, the strategy and goals of the company and the company's organizational culture.
The result- general and high-level legal work, which is often not tailor made to the company's needs. As a result, the overload will not reduce but actually increase, as the legal department will need to monitor and go over the work of the external firm, and update it to the specific company's needs.
In-House legal counsel in an outsourced model
An ideal solution which allows the legal department to benefit from the very best of both worlds:
On one hand, an in-house legal counsel who can work from the company's prem when needed, who will work as an extension of the legal department and act as an internal and inseparable part of the department, like an employee.
On the other hand, the model is very flexible, and allows the company to adapt and change the scope of the work to the actual load, and this fit perfect times of uncertainty.
In addition, there is no employment relationship which exists between the legal counsel and the company, and there are no employment costs.
And of course, the model works on a fixed monthly sum, there are no surprises and the company will achieve a 100% budgetary certainty.
We specialize in providing an in-house legal counsel in an outsource model, we helped and are helping many companies with their ongoing work in this model.
Contact us today and check how we can help you.