Legal Managed Services

W H I T E PA P E R

Legal Managed Services Corporate Managed Services: gain time, reduce risk and streamline your routine legal work

Corporate Managed Services: gain time, reduce risk and streamline your routine legal work

www.legadex.com1

About this white paper

and even drafting bespoke reports and corporate charts, for

In this white paper we look at

a merger or acquisition.

why managed services may be an

In every case, you have four choices in how you manage

excellent option for legal teams

your corporate housekeeping commitment: 1) doing it

to manage routine, recurring and

flex work basis, 3) outsourcing them to a third-party, or 4)

time-consuming work like corporate

teaming up with a managed services’ provider.

entity management or corporate

This white paper assumes that option 1, do it yourself,

housekeeping.

is not a realistic option for time, budgetary and depart-

yourself in-house, 2) hiring someone to do it in-house on a

mental strategic reasons. Option 2 requires considerable management time and the work can suffer from a lack of

Typical examples include keeping the corporate house-

continuity. Which leaves a choice between options 3 and

keeping database up to date, drafting and executing

4: outsourcing and managed services.

management appointments, executing mandatory public registrations and filings and providing support for audits

Read on to discover why we say managed services offer so

and reports. But also more complex tasks, like assisting

much more value than the alternatives.

with incorporating legal entities, arranging liquidations

2

Do it yourself

Temp / Flex

Managed Services

Outsourcing

Corporate Managed Services: gain time, reduce risk and streamline your routine legal work

context

Recurring legal work: do it yourself or put it in the hands of an external party?

From to-do lists that go on and on to budget pressures, new strategic demands from the business and winning the war for talent, being a GC has never been tougher than it is today.

You have to deal with more regular tasks than ever before, including mundane but vital things like compliance and risk management. At the same time you are expected to contribute to wider strategic business decisions, drive special projects and work closely with the board. And did we mention the pressure to do this with a limited budget and prove you add value to the business? One way of trying to square the circle is to seek support from a traditional law firm. But the cost, for recurring work, is unsustainable over the long term.

Best of both worlds: legal expertise and efficiency This is where Legal Managed Services come in. Legal Managed Services offer a way to place an entire workstream in the hands of a trusted legal expert who thinks and acts as an extension of your inhouse team while at the same time employing the latest legal technology platforms to make efficiency gains. Fast, simple and cost-effective.

At Legadex, we define two types of Legal Managed Services. One is Corporate Managed Services – basically everything involving or touched by legal entity management or corporate housekeeping. This is the topic of this white paper. The other is Contract Managed Services. These cover ongoing workstreams such as contract review and contract lifecycle management.

key trends

The forces driving Legal Managed Services This white paper focuses on Corporate Managed Services for legal entity management. However, the wider underlying trends that are driving these apply equally to Contract Managed Services.

So what are they?

In both cases, Legal Managed Services are a way to place an

Managed services are a familiar solution in IT, marketing, HR,

entire workstream in someone else’s hands. Crucially however,

logistics, finance, call centres and other business functions. The

unlike what we typically see as outsourcing, they allow you

first iterations go back over 20 years. In fact, the major laggard

to retain control of your workflows and data at all times. Even

in this has been us, legal. So what’s changing? Three drivers:

better, Legal Managed Services enable you to share insight and

workload, war for talent and technology.

information with the rest of your organisation at any time.

Finally, you gain the time and agility you need to be able to

Just as in other corporate functions, there are three drivers in

focus on strategic work and transforming your team from a

play: workload (combined with budget challenges); skills (the

perceived cost centre into a valued business adviser.

war for talent and the difficulty of recruiting and retaining the right people); and legal technology or legal tech (the opportunities arising from the new legal-specific technology platforms).

Today, workload, skills and legal tech are coming together. We like to think of it as a perfect marriage.

Corporate Managed Services: gain time, reduce risk and streamline your routine legal work

3

differently. At the moment, a lot of overflow work is handled either by traditional law firms or via temporary or flexible staffing, either on location or offsite. The former is expensive and not really how leading law firms want to profile themselves.

The latter must be organised and managed each time, can prove to be unstable (often not the same person or team, requiring training people each time) and opaque (you lose sight of your data while it’s out for processing). However, today’s legal-tech platforms, plus the proven track record of the Alternative Legal Services Providers who are driving them, are perfect for creating managed service solutions for tasks like legal entity management. Tasks that are recurrent, predictable and that can be turned into templates and structured around workflows.

In a world where tech savvy meets legal smarts to deliver a higher quality outcome at lower cost, the only real remaining question is why would you handle legal entity management or corporate housekeeping any other way?

what’s what

Legal Managed Services versus Outsourcing

Workload We covered many of the growing workload pressures on GCs in the previous section, but there are a couple more that are worth touching on. One is when the number of organisational entities

Often when people talk about managed services, they are actually talking about outsourcing – handing information to a third party who processes your data and then sends the result back to you. A standalone, job-focused concept with the emphasis on cost saving.

and jurisdictions is increasing but the legal team isn’t. Or legal

A management tool versus a management service

control is devolved, which means the centre loses insight.

Legal Managed Services, and especially Corporate Managed SerTalent scarcity

vices, are a management tool. The managed services provider

The second driver is the current talent shortage in the legal

forms an ongoing relationship with you, integrates with your

industry. You know how hard it is not only to find good people,

inhouse team and uses what they learn to offer advice and

but good people who are a good match for the role you have

assistance to improve what you do. This could involve stream-

in mind. This is especially challenging when the role involves

lining the workflow or flagging potential opportunities for or

recurring work – like legal entity management. Either, you don’t

threats to the wider business.

have enough work to keep someone busy full time; they are over-qualified and see the role as a stepping-stone to something

A managed services provider also offers two other benefits.

“better”; or they are underqualified, lack the right experience

The first is transparency: you know at any moment what they

and so require intensive training and supervision.

are doing with your data because you can see it. The second is added value for the rest of the business. This is because other

Legal technology

departments like finance, risk and others can have access to

The third aspect behind GCs’ growing interest in managed

the software platform. They can get the legal information they

services is simply their growing availability – the emergence of

need at any time, without having to send emails, chase people

integrated, legal tech-focused Alternative Legal Service Provid-

or hope that what they get back is full and up to date. That

ers and the fast-evolving opportunities these create to do things

saves you work, reduces risk and boosts efficiency.

4

Corporate Managed Services: gain time, reduce risk and streamline your routine legal work

An extension of your inhouse team A good managed services partner therefore handles your corporate housekeeping at a more competitive price than a law firm and brings more legal expertise and added value to the table than an outsourced supplier. In other words, unlike out-

OUTSOURCING • Lack of data visibility while processing and limited KPIs and metrics.

sourcing, where you hand over a task for processing, managed

• Solution and workflow imposed on client.

services deliver an integrated solution while ensuring you have

• No or few legal tech solutions.

full and ongoing access to your data and systems at all times.

• Other client departments shut out of platform.

In effect working as an extension of your inhouse team.

where to start

Why place your corporate housekeeping in a managed services solution There are several areas within legal that are suited to the managed services approach, but legal entity management or corporate housekeeping is the best place to start. This is because legal entity management reaches into so many other areas of the business, from other departments like risk and compliance, to other entities and even jurisdictions.

CORPORATE MANAGED SERVICES • Your data is always visible and accessible, also by other departments who need it.

• Co-designed workflow based on provider’s or client’s platform.

• Concept based on legal tech plus legal expertise.

• Possible to use same workflows across multiple jurisdictions • Predictable pricing.

Benefits at a glance Switching your legal entity management to a Corporate Managed Service is the quickest way to secure the greatest added value: • Always have insight into your data with access to your provider’s legal tech platform anytime and anywhere • Build efficient workstreams together to manage data collection, handling, alerts, requests and more • Offer seamless access to vital legal information to other departments in your organisation • Ensure access to the latest version of given data (a validated single source of truth) • Eliminate the challenges of either having too little work to employ someone full-time, employing people who are over-qualified for the role, or who are under-qualified for it • Save on costs and free up time, time that your people can use to add value on other topics that require attention.

Gain time to focus on your role as business partner People tend to think that corporate housekeeping is not very important. But it is. It’s also time-consuming. There are deadlines to meet, legal requirements to comply with, intensive interaction with other departments, entities and jurisdictions and lots of other aspects.

Corporate Managed Services: gain time, reduce risk and streamline your routine legal work

5

In this situation, employing a managed services solution is

structuring/ group rationalisation, corporate liquidations

ideal. First, legal entity management encompasses tasks –

and group mergers, risk and compliance, KYC and UBO and

corporate housekeeping services, governance services and

preparation for M&A transactions.

secretariat services – that can be turned into workflows or templates fairly easily. In total, about 40 different tasks, varying

These tasks are very easy to recast as workflows, and these

from once-a-year to ongoing and everything in between, such

workflows can be replicated across national and international

as the adoption of the annual accounts, arranging for board

entities with just some minor tweaks to account for the rules in

changes, appointment of proxyholders.

different jurisdictions. All these workflows and their information can also be made directly available to finance, auditors,

Extend efficient working to other areas

regulators, PE funds and other parties that the legal team

Moreover, once you have a Corporate Managed Services

typically works with.

solution in place, you can start to use it for related work that follows the same or similar workflows. This includes risk and

Really, once you start, the scope of what is possible just grows

compliance and certain corporate projects, like corporate re-

before your eyes.

Managing corporate database

Drafting corporate resolutions

Meeting management

Public registrations and filings

Corporate Managed Services KYC/AML services

Reporting entity information

Review / draft corporate documens

Maintain shareholders interests Company Health Checks

6

Corporate Managed Services: gain time, reduce risk and streamline your routine legal work

legal technology

The tech and service evolution enabling Corporate Managed Services Switching to Corporate Managed Services can be as easy or difficult as you want to make it. The difficult way is to research and learn about the technology yourself, identify and then buy or licence a suitable software platform, find an experienced, legally expert and reliable partner to operate it and manage everything on an ongoing basis.

Do it yourself or have it done for you That was the way you had to do it about 10 years ago. The easy way, available today, is to employ an experienced legal and tech-savvy Alternative Legal Services Provider to do it all for you. A good managed services provider will look at what you have and your legal-tech maturity and look at what you need and want. Then they will either create a tailored solution based on their platforms, or find a way to work with yours, if you have

Find out more

one. Go down that road and the worries about deadlines, staffing, time commitments and the rest become your provider’s

Whichever way you look at it, and whatever your

challenge instead of yours. You can also ask them to do more as

starting point, it is hard to make a case for doing rou-

you get more comfortable with the concept – like handle legal

tine legal entity management yourself when Corporate

entity management across multiple entities and jurisdictions,

Managed Services offer so much more. More quality,

for example – and know you will still only have one contact to

access, speed and transparency. All while reducing

deal with. And that the work will be done just as well because

your costs and creating time, time you can use to fo-

it is based on a workflow you are already familiar with.

cus on strategic decisions, transactions and projects.

Leaps in legal technology

What are you waiting for?

Whichever way you choose to go, one thing is certain: legal tech has improved massively in recent years. Whereas

For more information contact:

‘technology’ used to mean solutions in which you copied and entered information into a system, but with no link to the

Luc van Daele

underlying documents, today, everything is linked. Integrated.

lvandaele@legadex.com

This matters, because it means that information can now be instantly verified in the source documents, if needed, so creating

Femke Pos

an information and audit trail all in the same place. Another

fpos@legadex.com

key change is the evolution platforms have undergone from a passive repository to support for workflows – next steps to take,

Legadex B.V.

plus alarms, triggers, notifications, reminders, tasks and more.

Antonio Vivaldistraat 64

That’s great for efficiency. A further one is the ability to main-

1083 HP Amsterdam

tain immediate access to your data at all times, and to open it

The Netherlands

up to other parties who might also need to access it while it is

info@legadex.com

being processed.

+31 (0)20 8208396

www.legadex.com

Corporate Managed Services: gain time, reduce risk and streamline your routine legal work

7

Legadex The legal industry is ready for change. Out with expensive and old-fashioned practices; in with new thinking and services. Because just as in other corporate departments, developments in technology, big data and AI are triggering new ways of working within the legal department and driving a fundamental challenge to the established legal services landscape. For those who are ready for an innovative approach to legal work, Legadex offers new and exciting ways to help you: • Achieve more with fewer people and a limited budget • Get your standard legal work done faster and more efficiently • Enhance the quality of your legal team and legal work within the company • Convince the rest of the business that you are an invaluable strategic partner • Attract and retain legal and paralegal talent in today’s ultra-competitive labour market.

Legadex was founded in 2008 as the first ALSP (Alternative Legal Service Provider) in Europe. Today this innovation-based business model has a secure position in the legal market. From our head office in Amsterdam’s business district, we combine tech-savvy lawyers with new processes and leading technology so business leaders and legal departments can create lasting value for their companies. We serve over 300 publicly listed, private-equity-held and family-owned blue-chip companies, large and scale-up companies, financial service providers and investment funds.

www.legadex.com