W H I T E PA P E R
Transforming corporate legal with flexible staff
Transforming corporate legal with flexible and interim staff
www.legadex.com1
Corporate legal departments and general counsel face unprecedented challenges. These range from repositioning themselves as strategic business partners to managing increasing administrative workloads, all while budget constraints mean headcounts are being frozen or reduced. Staffing services – flexible and interim support – are a well-known way to cover unexpected peaks and manage absences. A tactical choice to deal with a specific situation. But with the arrival of Alternative Legal Service Providers, flexible support is becoming an increasingly strategic choice. Not just an emergency solution, but a new way to continually tailor capacity, improve efficiency, add capabilities, rethink workflows and leverage the latest legal technology. In this white paper, we explore the new ways flexible support can add value.
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Transforming corporate legal with flexible and interim staff
Legal-tech is transforming the market for legal staffing If Covid-19 has taught us one thing, it is that the world can change even faster than we thought. For corporate legal departments, rosy growth prognoses morphed overnight into standstill budgets, unfilled vacancies and unpredictable fluctuations in legal work. Result: overloaded legal teams being asked to do more with fewer resources. Crucially, this appears to be a structural change. In fact, the scale of the challenge posed by these changes is so great that traditional ad-hoc solutions can’t absorb the shocks. The discounts law firms can offer to handle additional legal work cannot compensate for the scale of the budget cuts legal departments are experiencing. Nor do law firms have the business acumen needed to slot into a corporate environment, or the familiarity with the legal-tech workflows that are increasingly shaping the work of corporate legal departments. So what about the traditional solution to lack of capacity: the staffing agencies? Here again, legal technology is changing the game. As legal-tech workflows gain ground in the corporate legal world, it becomes harder for traditional staffing agencies to supply lawyers and paralegals who are both up to speed with the latest legal requirements and familiar with the newest legal IT systems and workflows. This is where Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) come in. As experienced lawyers and paralegals with a background
ALSPs: the better choice when you need flexible support Everyone who reads the legal media knows about the growth of the ALSPs. As a specialism within the corporate legal field, they combine people, processes and software to create streamlined services and solutions. Flexible and interim staffing is a central element in this. But how does the ALSP offering differ from what the staffing agencies pitch? To explain the difference, let’s look at Legadex, the leading ALSP in the Benelux.
in legal-tech and new ways of working, they offer flexible and interim support as part of a comprehensive tech-enabled legal
Unlike a staffing agency, Legadex doesn’t work with freelanc-
services concept. That means expert legal knowledge plus full
ers and we aren’t an HR specialist. Unlike a law firm, we exist
familiarity with legal-tech enabled workflows, AI and machine
to improve the execution of legal processes and workflows
learning-based solutions and other quality and efficiency en-
through the introduction of new legal technologies and new
hancing tools.
service models. We build teams that run our managed services. At the same time, they can be made available to provide onsite or remote flexible and interim staffing support. And when the assignment is over (or during if it is only part-time) they continue to be employed by us as part of our teams. The benefits of this approach are threefold: 1), our lawyers and paralegals are trained in and familiar with the latest legal-tech solutions and business software; 2), they have expert colleagues to back them up, spar with and learn from, and 3), we can offer them a career path within Legadex, which is good for commitment. →
Transforming corporate legal with flexible and interim staff
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As a result, corporate legal teams that work with Legadex can choose from flexible support, interim support or a managed services solution to fulfill their needs in the most efficient manner. They can also tailor a mix-and-match solution. Which one or ones a client opts for depends on their needs: • Flexible support is ideal when you need short-term help to cover peak periods, or regular support for just a few hours
Ad hoc solutions: backup expertise for legal-tech workflows Traditional staffing support involves supplying extra hands so corporate legal teams can manage workload peaks or cover for the absence of a team member. A backup, basically.
each week. • Interim support is ideal when you need cover for an extend-
But in the context of a radically changed business environment,
ed leave of absence due to illness, parental leave, or study,
the increasing use of legal-tech and a fast-changing legal role,
for example.
do traditional staffing agencies offer the structural answers and
• A managed service solution is an efficient and effective way to run a recurring administrative process like contract review
added value that under-pressure legal departments need as they face up to their new world of work?
or corporate housekeeping. We think that in many cases, they don’t. The staffing agenIn the case of the flexible and interim options, the additional
cy model has its roots in meeting ad hoc needs, and while
skills and capabilities ALSPs bring to the table offer a wider
structural staffing solutions are on the rise, they tend to focus
range of support than either a staffing agency or a law firm:
on production or manufacturing rather than knowledge-based work. General staffing agencies simply don’t have the depth of
• Conventional staffing but with in-depth legal-tech knowhow.
legal expertise and breadth of experience to meet the process,
• Continuous legal team rightsizing.
knowledge, legal-tech and team backup requirements of corpo-
• Legal-tech transformation based on legal-tech rollout,
rate legal departments.
workflow improvement and optimisation.
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Transforming corporate legal with flexible and interim staff
Contrast this with ALSPs. Being already familiar with legal-tech, lawyers and paralegals who work for an ALSP add significant extra value when more specialist capabilities, capacities and knowledge are required. Examples of technology-driven workflows that ALSP lawyers and paralegals are better equipped to support include: • Corporate housekeeping / legal entity management • Contract review and contract management • Legal reporting • GDPR compliance • KYC compliance • M&A transactions and due diligence • Restructuring and refinancing This is not a criticism of freelance lawyers and paralegals. It is simply a recognition that the legal world is changing in ways that increasingly require the skills and knowledge of ALSP lawyers and paralegals. They are just more used to working in and driving tech-enabled workflows on a daily basis, either for other clients or as part of a managed service solution, and they are already familiar with the various legal-tech applications and packages on the market. This has clear benefits when it comes to quickly covering for an ad hoc absence.
Rightsizing solutions: build a flexible and scalable team Another way you can use ALSP flexible and interim support is to build dynamic teams that act as constantly scaling extensions of your inhouse legal colleagues. This helps you to respond directly to both urgent and longerterm needs in your department and the wider business.
This is a step up from ad hoc support and involves creating a support framework or master contract within which you can adjust your support levels as required. In effect, it is a form of constant rightsizing that is far more predictable, efficient and effective than simply asking an agency to send along an interim lawyer or interim paralegal. Instead, you can be confident of getting someone who is familiar with your workflow, the tech-
“You can be confident of getting someone who is familiar with your workflow, the technology you use and, after a while, your organisation.”
nology you use and, after a while, your organisation. Someone with the right skills and a click with corporate culture – and all without having to spend time you don’t have evaluating CVs and interviewing people. →
Transforming corporate legal with flexible and interim staff
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are central to the ALSP model – better processes and new legal IT technologies – make ALSP lawyers and paralegals a real value-adding option in today’s corporate legal climate. Earlier we noted that lawyers and paralegals who work for an ALSP add significant extra value when more specialist capabilities and knowledge are required. But that is only half the story because as well as being users of legal-tech, ALSP lawyers and paralegals are implementers of it as well. They can help to develop and implement legal-tech strategies for corporate housekeeping / legal entity management, contract review and The ALSP model is usually based on having lawyers and para-
contract management, legal reporting, GDPR and KYC compli-
legals work in teams – it certainly is at Legadex. This ensures
ance, M&A transactions and due diligence and restructuring
a ready supply of the right people with the right skills to meet
and refinancing. They can also suggest solutions to eliminate
a corporate legal department’s changing business needs. This
information backlogs as well as accelerate large projects and
model also supports the creation of fixed teams to look after
drive process improvement.
recurring work that corporate legal departments lack the time to handle inhouse or internally. In this example, ALSP flexible and interim solutions support a structural approach to staffing by supporting capacity building
Staffing is an increasingly strategic decision
and the constant rightsizing of the inhouse corporate legal team. Think of it as ‘planned mix and match’ or structured ad hoc support that allows corporate legal to add resources at peak times or on the fly and reduce them again when the pressure is off.
Legal-tech solutions: implement a new departmental strategy
The flexible and interim solution described above indicates how ‘traditional staffing’, as reinterpreted by the ALSPs is moving from a tactical, short-term problem-solving choice to a strategic management option.
This is most clearly seen in rightsizing and legal-tech implementation. But even in regular staffing, the impact of legal-tech is being felt as it redefines the capabilities and experience
The third way in which ALSP flexible and interim solutions can add value is by enabling corporate legal departments to employ their legal-tech knowledge to identify, define and implement new and more efficient technology-driven ways of working.
required for a successful placement.
Would you like to discuss your flexible and interim staffing support opportunities? Call Legadex on +31-20-8208396 or email us on
ALSP lawyers and paralegals are not only excellent lawyers and
info@legadex.com
paralegals. They are also tech-savvy and so enjoy devising and implementing better ways of working. Adding flexible or inter-
Legadex B.V.
im ALSP support can provide a fast and cost-efficient way to
Antonio Vivaldistraat 64
introduce legal-tech to your workflows or improve your team’s
1083 HP Amsterdam
use of legal-tech.
The Netherlands info@legadex.com
With technology-based process optimisation increasingly
+31 (0) 208208396
central to the efficient handling of administrative legal work, flexible support from an ALSP lawyer or paralegal can bring
www.legadex.com
new ideas and insights to the table. The additional skills that
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Transforming corporate legal with flexible and interim staff