Further to our CYBERCRIME SAFETY ADVICE article the UK's Solicitors Regulation Authority (“SRA”) has also published a warning on their official website:

Warning: Website for 'GLS Law Company'/'Global Law Solutions' claiming to be a law firm

The SRA has also confirmed that it does not authorize or regulate any firms under the names “GLS Law Company” or “Global Law Solutions”, nor do they nor does it authorise solicitors  named “Harvey Willis”, “Jacob Mathews”, “Mike Specter”, “Eva Zlotnik” or “Sophia Novak”. Those names being the names associated with the scam. 

To ensure the authenticity of any communication, we recommend contacting our genuine firm, directly through established and reliable channels like our official website. 

For additional verification or to confirm the regulated status of individuals or firms, you may also reach out to the SRA. We urge the public to remain vigilant and refer to official sources for accurate information.

IMPORTANT PUBLIC SAFETY NOTICE:

GLS has recently become aware of the existence of a potentially deceptive website attempting to impersonate elements of the GLS Group. Through this Notice, we wish to inform you of this suspected cybercrime activity. 

The Suspected Scam:

The suspected scam websites www.gls-law.uk and http://www.gls-lawyer.com (the “Reported Websites”) is using a domain name very similar to our own which is www.gls-law.com.

Each of the Reported Websites appear to have used scraped data from various historic websites of the GLS Group to give the appearance of a website similar to our own (e.g., name, font choice, icons, certain aspects of look and feel). 

We believe that the operators of the Reported Websites have the deliberate intent to dupe members of the public into thinking the Reported Websites’ operators are a legitimate service provider – potentially even part of the GLS Group. 

The operators of the Reported Websites use email addresses that are deceptively similar to the GLS Group’s email addresses (e.g., “Joe Blogs <joeblogs@gls-law.uk>”), to contact victims / members of the public. 

We wish to reiterate that the representatives of the Reported Websites are NOT employees, contractors, or agents of the GLS Group or any company comprised within the GLS Group. Further, the GLS Group DOES NOT have any association or relationship whatsoever with the Reported Websites. 

We are aware that certain members of the public claim to have been defrauded of sizeable sums of money by representatives of the Reported Websites through elaborate, prolonged and detailed ruses. 

The nature of the scam seems to involve pretending to help fraud victims recover funds that had been stolen from them, as follows: 

1. offering a no upfront fee in return for tracking down the victim’s stolen funds. Ostensibly the service provider would only be paid a percentage of any sums recovered; 
2. claiming the lost funds have been located but they have been converted into crypto-currency; 
3. deploying elaborate KYC/AML requests (supposedly from GLS Law Company and the National Australia Bank Limited etc) for the sake of “releasing” the recovered funds; 
4. asking the unwitting victims to pay additional sums (e.g., tax, fees, etc) for the crypto funds to be released as fiscal currency; and 
5. then absconding with any funds paid by the victims.

The Reported Websites appear to intend to mislead unsuspecting individuals and exploit their trust in reputable brands such as our own, ING, Lloyds Bank, National Australia Bank, Visa and BNP Paribas, etc. 

The Reported Websites are engaging in activities that could harm users, such as, amongst other things, purporting to help recover funds from crypto scam, soliciting personal information, spreading malware/viruses, and performing unauthorized financial transactions. 

 

What We Know So Far:

We are not cybercrime experts but below is what we have gathered thus far: 

• The Reported Websites have absolutely no connection with the GLS Group of companies. 
• The Reported Websites are, in our opinion – likely to be a scam website. 
• This scam has targeted victims in at least the UK and Belgium so far. 
• The Reported Websites' owners portray it as a “law company” but are not registered with the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (“SRA”) in the UK. All firms/solicitors operating in the UK must be registered with the SRA. 
• The biodatas of the various lawyer profiles on the Reported Websites do not relate to admitted solicitors in the UK according to a search of the SRA roll. 
• The pictures of the lawyers on this website all appear to have been sourced from public image stock databases. 
• The Reported Websites were only launched in the last 30 days ago and various “site safety websites” declare it to be a high-risk site. 
• The Reported Websites are incomplete and does not pass professional scrutiny from the perspective of a diligent law firm. 
• The Reported Websites appear to be hosted by a service provider in Russia – “LLC Rusengoresource”. 
• The email service provider is Yandex – a major Russian provider.  
• There are no required legal addresses or contact details on the Reported Websites. 
• We have been advised that this suspected fraudulent activity has involved at least the following email addresses/persons: 
  • Andrew Smith - andrewsmith@gls-law.uk (not an employee of GLS)
  • Jacob Matthews - jacobmathews@gls-law.uk (not an employee of GLS) 
  • Mike Specter - mikespecter@gls-law.uk (not an employee of GLS)
  • info@gls-law.uk (not an email address owned or used by GLS)
  • coinbase@investigation.eu.com (not an email address owned or used by GLS) 
  • help@coinbase.com (not an email address owned or used by GLS)
  • support@bankaust.uk.com (not an email address owned or used by GLS)
  • info@fca.so (not an email address owned or used by GLS)
  • security@visa.com  (not an email address owned or used by GLS)

We want to emphasize that the Reported Websites and each of the email addresses / names above have NO affiliation with the GLS Group or any of the entities that comprise the GLS Group, and is not authorized to represent or conduct any business on our behalf.

TIPS:

We encourage all persons who are contacted by the Reported Websites to take appropriate steps to protect themselves and to notify relevant law enforcement authorities if they are victims of suspected fraud.  

At the GLS Group, we prioritise the protection and wellbeing of our clients and the public. We have reported this scam to and, will continue working with, the appropriate authorities, including the UK National Crime Agency. 

We strongly advise all our clients and the public to always perform some quick research on such organisations before engaging their services. 

The GLS Group will also never request confidential information or bank details by phone or email. All payment requests by GLS Group would always include supporting documents such as an Invoice or Work Order. 

To avoid becoming a victim of such scams, there are several actions you can take:

1. always verify the address of the website you are on;
2. if you receive an email, check the sender’s email address carefully;
3. perform a search on their physical company address on Google Maps to ensure there is indeed a physical location;
4. pay attention to the spelling and grammar on the website and emails - fake emails or websites often contain errors;
5. if the sender is unknown, do not click on any links and do not open attached files;
6. if in doubt please, contact GLS Group directly and ask if the person approaching you is associated with the GLS Group;
7. check if Personnel purporting to be solicitors are indeed registered with the country’s regulatory body; 
8. check for their social media accounts, especially their LinkedIn profiles; and
9. search for any news articles on the company and its Personnel for their media presence. 

Again, if you have been in any way impacted by the Reported Websites, we recommend you approach relevant law enforcement authorities and also consider seeking appropriate legal representation to assist you. You can use this link to submit a fraud report to the National Fraud & Cyber Crime Reporting Centre UK  

Speakers 

This seminar will draw upon the experiences of these great speakers:

Matthew Glynn | Managing Director 

Matt is the Managing Director of the GLS Group, a leading legal disruptor that delivers 24/7/365 access to world-class legal solutions. Solutions that enable in-house teams and law firms to achieve far greater productivity outcomes.

Be it by AI based contract reviews, contract automation solutions or by architecting high-performance legal teams, GLS Group provides access to world class solutions at a disruptive price point.

A former Big Law technology lawyer, Matt has been responsible for the development of 120+ technology enabled tools that extend what in-house legal resources can achieve. Matt is an industry leader in helping in-house teams achieve far greater performance outcomes with fewer resources. Matt regularly implements productivity solutions to legal teams of all sizes across the globe and has helped them achieve external legal budget compression ratios of 1:10 and time task compression ratios that routinely exceed 1:20.

Simon Bryan | Principal 

Simon is a co-founder and principal of the GLS Group, a leading legal disruptor that delivers 24/7/365 access to world-class legal solutions. Solutions that enable in-house teams and law firms to achieve far greater productivity outcomes.

Be it by AI based contract reviews, contract automation solutions or by architecting high-performance legal teams, GLS Group provides access to world class solutions at a disruptive price point.

Prior to founding GLS, Simon was a partner in a leading global law firm where he built a pre-eminent TMT/IPT practice in the EMEA region.  Simon also held a number of prominent senior in-house roles, including the first Acting General Counsel of TwoFour 54, Director of Group Legal for one of the Dubai Holding Group entities (heading 49 group companies) and Chief Legal Officer & Director of Business Affairs at the Doha Film Institute.  Simon also founded a magazine distribution and publishing company in Hong Kong. 

Speakers 

This seminar will draw upon the experiences of these great speakers:

Matthew Glynn | Managing Director 

Matt is the Managing Director of the GLS Group, a leading legal disruptor that delivers 24/7/365 access to world-class legal solutions. Solutions that enable in-house teams and law firms to achieve far greater productivity outcomes.

Be it by AI based contract reviews, contract automation solutions or by architecting high-performance legal teams, GLS Group provides access to world class solutions at a disruptive price point.

A former Big Law technology lawyer, Matt has been responsible for the development of 120+ technology enabled tools that extend what in-house legal resources can achieve. Matt is an industry leader in helping in-house teams achieve far greater performance outcomes with fewer resources. Matt regularly implements productivity solutions to legal teams of all sizes across the globe and has helped them achieve external legal budget compression ratios of 1:10 and time task compression ratios that routinely exceed 1:20.

Simon Bryan | Principal 

Simon is a co-founder and principal of the GLS Group, a leading legal disruptor that delivers 24/7/365 access to world-class legal solutions. Solutions that enable in-house teams and law firms to achieve far greater productivity outcomes.

Be it by AI based contract reviews, contract automation solutions or by architecting high-performance legal teams, GLS Group provides access to world class solutions at a disruptive price point.

Prior to founding GLS, Simon was a partner in a leading global law firm where he built a pre-eminent TMT/IPT practice in the EMEA region.  Simon also held a number of prominent senior in-house roles, including the first Acting General Counsel of TwoFour 54, Director of Group Legal for one of the Dubai Holding Group entities (heading 49 group companies) and Chief Legal Officer & Director of Business Affairs at the Doha Film Institute.  Simon also founded a magazine distribution and publishing company in Hong Kong. 

Speakers 

This seminar will draw upon the experiences of these great speakers:

Matthew Glynn | Managing Director 

Matt is the Managing Director of the GLS Group, a leading legal disruptor that delivers 24/7/365 access to world-class legal solutions. Solutions that enable in-house teams and law firms to achieve far greater productivity outcomes.

Be it by AI based contract reviews, contract automation solutions or by architecting high-performance legal teams, GLS Group provides access to world class solutions at a disruptive price point.

A former Big Law technology lawyer, Matt has been responsible for the development of 120+ technology enabled tools that extend what in-house legal resources can achieve. Matt is an industry leader in helping in-house teams achieve far greater performance outcomes with fewer resources. Matt regularly implements productivity solutions to legal teams of all sizes across the globe and has helped them achieve external legal budget compression ratios of 1:10 and time task compression ratios that routinely exceed 1:20.

Simon Bryan | Principal 

Simon is a co-founder and principal of the GLS Group, a leading legal disruptor that delivers 24/7/365 access to world-class legal solutions. Solutions that enable in-house teams and law firms to achieve far greater productivity outcomes.

Be it by AI based contract reviews, contract automation solutions or by architecting high-performance legal teams, GLS Group provides access to world class solutions at a disruptive price point.

Prior to founding GLS, Simon was a partner in a leading global law firm where he built a pre-eminent TMT/IPT practice in the EMEA region.  Simon also held a number of prominent senior in-house roles, including the first Acting General Counsel of TwoFour 54, Director of Group Legal for one of the Dubai Holding Group entities (heading 49 group companies) and Chief Legal Officer & Director of Business Affairs at the Doha Film Institute.  Simon also founded a magazine distribution and publishing company in Hong Kong. 

Speakers 

This seminar will draw upon the experiences of these great speakers:

Matthew Glynn | Managing Director 

Matt is the Managing Director of the GLS Group, a leading legal disruptor that delivers 24/7/365 access to world-class legal solutions. Solutions that enable in-house teams and law firms to achieve far greater productivity outcomes.

Be it by AI based contract reviews, contract automation solutions or by architecting high-performance legal teams, GLS Group provides access to world class solutions at a disruptive price point.

A former Big Law technology lawyer, Matt has been responsible for the development of 120+ technology enabled tools that extend what in-house legal resources can achieve. Matt is an industry leader in helping in-house teams achieve far greater performance outcomes with fewer resources. Matt regularly implements productivity solutions to legal teams of all sizes across the globe and has helped them achieve external legal budget compression ratios of 1:10 and time task compression ratios that routinely exceed 1:20.

Simon Bryan | Principal

Simon is a co-founder and principal of the GLS Group, a leading legal disruptor that delivers 24/7/365 access to world-class legal solutions. Solutions that enable in-house teams and law firms to achieve far greater productivity outcomes.

Be it by AI based contract reviews, contract automation solutions or by architecting high-performance legal teams, GLS Group provides access to world class solutions at a disruptive price point.

Prior to founding GLS, Simon was a partner in a leading global law firm where he built a pre-eminent TMT/IPT practice in the EMEA region.  Simon also held a number of prominent senior in-house roles, including the first Acting General Counsel of TwoFour 54, Director of Group Legal for one of the Dubai Holding Group entities (heading 49 group companies) and Chief Legal Officer & Director of Business Affairs at the Doha Film Institute.  Simon also founded a magazine distribution and publishing company in Hong Kong. 

A checklist is a potent knowledge technology that is drastically under-utilised by the legal industry. At a time when more must be done better with less – it’s time to revisit the role of the checklist.

In this legal operations white paper, we examine why checklists are not being used enough by the legal profession, what a good checklist looks like and what benefits it can bring to your in house legal team.

SOME INSIGHTS

Whilst it is true that the court room instincts of a litigator or a seasoned negotiator take time to hone… and that a sliver of aged grey hair can work magic – the reality is that much of lawyering simply entails:

• spotting, mitigating and addressing issues that cause problems; and/or
• following procedures, typically for similar types of transactions/projects/cases.

Today, knowledge and experience can be readily captured, arranged and retrieved on a global basis instantaneously, including via software, at costs that are bordering on negligible.

Simply put, massive amounts of knowledge and experience can actually be captured in tool-based repositories such as simple checklists and be made available to everyone.

So, why then doesn't the average in-house lawyer ("IHL") make much better use of the humble checklist? Is it due to:

• lawyers traditionally being reluctant to systematically reduce their art to process?
• IHLs being too busy to stop and prepare them?
• a cultural hangover from private practice days - where the “to death do us part” love affair with billable hours shunned efficiency initiatives?

Nonetheless, checklists are a fundamental aspect of efficient legal operations - perhaps being the single most potent driver of workflow automation and process quality control.

BENEFITS IF PROBLEM IS SOLVED WELL

"Most lawyers, whether they are conscious about it or not, have mental checklists they follow… and by shifting the paradigm from art and craft to process, we can improve quality, efficiency and results.” - Francisco Ramos Jnr.

Hand holding light bulb on dark background, new idea concept

The benefits of a checklist are innumerable and include:

• Memory - it’s easy for us to forget things – checklists prevent that from happening
• Aggregate Wisdom - a well-maintained checklist aggregates your IHLs' experience/capabilities
• Leverage - junior members can replicate the issue spotting capabilities of senior team members
• Quality Assurance - checklists are the dutiful servants of essential Quality Assurances
• Compliance - checking off what is required makes it easy to identify non-compliance issues
• Time - you can get through tasks far quicker – freeing up more time for strategic matters
• Delegation - a strong checklist and a teammate with common sense makes delegation easier
• Consistency - checklists raise the level of legal performance on a far more consistent basis
• Empowerment - team members have the tools to keep things moving forward
• Standards - checklists allow you to define a single improving standard for your IHL team
• Automation - checklists/points drive workflows through a “pass and proceed” methodology

CHECKLISTS AND LEGAL OPERATIONS

"We have to do a lot of thinking as lawyers. Anything that frees us from having to think about something makes our lives better and us more productive."  Tim Green

As you can see from the above list of benefits, the humble checklist can deliver an exponential boost to any IHL's operational agenda – driving time task efficiency and leveraging quality assurance.

Implementing checklists in a slightly more comprehensive and systematic way into a legal function is a much easier undertaking than many other transformation projects, making them a critical first step.

The simple paradigm shift required for you to harness the power of checklist to underpinning perpetually improving legal operations is easy – you simply need to start to reduce:

Practice to Process and Process to a Checklist

If the medical industry can reduce something as complex and as high stakes as heart surgery into a series of checklists – a legal function can certainly create checklist(s) around common support constructs.

Again - IHLs benefit tremendously when they inculcate a "checklist culture" into their daily operations. It costs nothing but time to prepare one – and that time is infinitely repaid going forward.

Here are the Top 10 Features of a quality checklist to help you to start preparing your own world class checklists:

• Author - they are prepared by people that know the task comprehensively
• Complete - all issues that should be included must be included
• Order - issue orders must flow logically
• Scope - it should not contain matters that don’t need to be checked
• Short - a checklist should be as short as possible
• Usability - they must be super easy to use
• Aggregate - the broadest possible range of experience you can access
• Maintained - things change – including the issues of the day, their importance and how to respond
• User - checklist must be designed for the specific user (e.g is the user an IHL or non-legal?)
• Tested - you should regularly test how your checklist performs

THE GLS SOLUTION

As with most things, you could take the principles contained in this whitepaper and produce a checklist for yourself. The problem with that, however, is that you may not have the time nor the expertise to do so.

As always, GLS can help to shift many aspects of legal operations away from the less reliable “art of lawyering" towards a more reliable “process” based approach that drives performance and consistency.

We have a wide selection of checklists based upon:

• Agreements: common commercial agreements (including our Top 10 Legal Docs - The Work Horses)
• Transactions: basic transaction type activities (e.g. due diligence)
• Compliance: a selection of key compliance topics (e.g.data privacy)

Indeed, we are in the process of building the world’s largest library of legal checklists as their role in underpinning effective legal operations is critical. 

NEXT STEPS

Click here, if you want to see what checklists we have available.

WHAT'S COVERED? 

Foundational Legal Team Policy Assets & Prioritisation – Detailed Outline:

Examining the essential policy assets needed to truly enable your legal function and validate its performance.

• Legal policy universe
• Acknowledge Priority areas
• Prioritised decision making

Speakers

This seminar will draw upon the experiences of these great speakers:

Matthew Glynn | Managing Director

Matt is the Managing Director of the GLS Group, a leading legal disruptor that delivers 24/7/365 access to world-class legal solutions. Solutions that enable in-house teams and law firms to achieve far greater productivity outcomes.

Be it by AI based contract reviews, contract automation solutions or by architecting high-performance legal teams, GLS Group provides access to world class solutions at a disruptive price point.

A former Big Law technology lawyer, Matt has been responsible for the development of 120+ technology enabled tools that extend what in-house legal resources can achieve. Matt is an industry leader in helping in-house teams achieve far greater performance outcomes with fewer resources. Matt regularly implements productivity solutions to legal teams of all sizes across the globe and has helped them achieve external legal budget compression ratios of 1:10 and time task compression ratios that routinely exceed 1:20.

 

Simon Bryan | Principal

Simon is a co-founder and principal of the GLS Group, a leading legal disruptor that delivers 24/7/365 access to world-class legal solutions. Solutions that enable in-house teams and law firms to achieve far greater productivity outcomes.

Be it by AI based contract reviews, contract automation solutions or by architecting high-performance legal teams, GLS Group provides access to world class solutions at a disruptive price point.

Prior to founding GLS, Simon was a partner in a leading global law firm where he built a pre-eminent TMT/IPT practice in the EMEA region.  Simon also held a number of prominent senior in-house roles, including the first Acting General Counsel of TwoFour 54, Director of Group Legal for one of the Dubai Holding Group entities (heading 49 group companies) and Chief Legal Officer & Director of Business Affairs at the Doha Film Institute.  Simon also founded a magazine distribution and publishing company in Hong Kong. 

 

GLS has just been nominated as a Finalist for the:

Middle East Legal Awards 2020: “Innovation through Technology | Private Practice”

So we would like to share our journey through this Awards process with you - not least of which because of the support you have provided us to date.

Here are what we feel personifies the GLS brand of innovation:

• We launched The GLS Legal Operations Centre - the most comprehensive legal operations resource platform across Middle East, Asia and Africa - access is also entirely free
• We have helped countless in-house legal teams ("IHLs") achieve external spend compression ratios of 10:1.  I.e. every $1 an IHL team spent on GLS tools resulted in a $10 saving for their external budget
• We helped transform countless IHL teams (both MNC and sole regional counsels), to digitise their operations and to enhance their value recognition within their businesses
• We made sure every solution & resource was affordable to any IHL team globally by offering flat, non-discriminatory pricing that is not more than 20% of what a traditional law firm could offer
• We shared our Proprietary Thinking on how IHLs can make resourcing decisions as part of a strategic, transformation agenda
• We made cutting edge legal tech affordable and accessible to all businesses (including contract automation, AI billing review, automated compliance dashboards and AI based contract review)

Thank you very much to the MELA Awards Committee - we are proud to have built a business characterised by the above.

INTRODUCTION

While his words are commonly attributed to his support for the US Constitution, they also offer an important warning to in-house lawyers (“IHLs”) who frequently fail to attract proper value recognition.

The lesson is this: If you have not communicated to your team and your internal client what you stand for, how do you expect to be judged?

 Are you happy with how your IHL team is presently being judged?

A Legal Department Service Charter (“LDSC”) is a policy-based asset that sets out for your IHLs and your internal clients the operational frame of reference for your legal department – it is your Operating Charter.

In this article, we unpack the challenges posed by operating without an LDSC, the benefits it can bring … and how easily and quickly you can implement one of your own.

KEY ISSUE INSIGHT

GLS has observed a positive and consistent correlation between IHLs that do not enjoy optimal value recognition and the absence of a clearly articulated and authoritative LDSC.

 

Generally speaking, "charters" are the record of authority that permit a particular initiative to commence – in this case, defining the purpose and objectives of your IHL – it serves as a source of legitimacy.

The LDSC has two primary purposes:

FIRSTLY: it serves as a reference for your team members, defining a focus, direction and context for their efforts and contributions – the team's function & purpose and the means to achieve it.

By providing clear directions as to the purpose and objectives of the team, and ways of working, the LDSC keeps the team focused on the right activities and maintains critical departmental momentum.

SECONDLY: critically, it educates the internal clients and wider business units as to what your IHL team actually does – providing understanding of a department's purpose heavily influences how it is used.

The LDSC also prescribes how internal clients should interact with the IHL and what they can expect from their interactions with the IHL team – bringing clarity around your IHL’s role and performance.

Sadly, too few IHLs consciously implement LDSCs, resulting in “mandates” that evolve into existence as a business grows, without the same deliberate intent as many other business areas benefit from.

Click Here to Get Your Legal Department Services Charter

CONSEQUENCES OF UNDERLYING PROBLEM

A board’s charter is a vital instrument that clearly defines the roles, responsibilities and authorities of the board of directors and sets the direction for the management and control of the organisation.

Similarly setting boundaries, establishing authorities and clearly communicating expectations around the performance of your legal function is critical, particularly given the growing pressures IHLs face.

Businesses are increasingly expecting IHLs to perform miracles and deliver unlimited legal support, in real time, with little/no turn-around time – an unrealistic expectation that is hard to manage without an LDSC.

The IHL’s responses need to be clinically precise and increasingly customer centric but also have a much sharper sense of operating priorities – something hard to deliver without a clear LDSC asset.

We consistently observe that IHLs operating without a meaningful LDSC frequently experience some, if not all, of the following:

• No Man’s Land: the IHLs seem to just exist – operating in a kind of "no man’s land" in terms of authority, reporting, autonomy or mandate
• Unfair Performance Assessment: the team’s performance is undervalued in part due to a lack of clear performance criteria against which it should assessed
• Opaque Engagement: unclear / no formal rules / guidance around how the business should engage with its IHLs
• Disorientated Productivity: being busy is not the same as being “productive”. Without a clear and consistent objective, IHL capacity is wasted on out-of-scope matters
• Perception of Low Performance: IHLs are judged against constantly shifting goal posts, exacerbated by frequent pressures to undertake tasks that are not within their domain of expertise
• Inadequate Resourcing: regularly being asked to reduce budgets and IHLs being unable to defend budget decisions, resulting in a perpetual firefighting modus operandi
• Blame: IHLs become the scapegoat whenever things go wrong, because the perception is that they are responsible for everything
• Perpetual Fire Fighting: IHLs operate on a reactive footing, rather than preemptively working with the business to pro-actively control the utilisation of IHL resources

BENEFITS IF PROBLEM IS SOLVED WELL

Excessive uncertainty is a miserable problem for IHLs and their internal clients to deal with. The absence of an LDSC perpetuates the corrosive impact of operational uncertainty.

By using an LDSC to remove that uncertainty, your legal function can begin an operational transformation that is increasingly characterised by:

• Platform Legitimacy - the LDSC delivers you and your team a clear and legitimate platform that the business can understand and respond to
• Clear Responsibility Delineations - the LDSC should be clear on the domains of responsibility inside your business and such endorsements should ideally be delivered from the Board level
• Authority - your LDSC should capture you authority within the business
• A Clear Operating Protocol - a clear standard operating procedure for how the business should engage with the IHL and vice versa is available to your business
• Focus on the Internal Client - an increasingly client centric protocol to your business – something that will be appreciated by the internal client, whilst also effectively managing expectations
• Work Prioritisation - your LDSC will enhance your ability to manage finite team resources – decisions can be made in light of agreed/endorsed priorities
• Internal Client Validation - the basis for you to objectively demonstrate your IHL’s contributions via empirical data comes into existence – performance against agreed priorities can be assessed
• Legal Budgeting legitimacy - IHL budget requests can increasingly be supported by hard data that shows the effectiveness with which you have discharged your mandate
• Increased IHL Team Morale - morale is improved as the team’s recognised mandate and operational boundaries are more clearly understood and operational uncertainty is eased

THE GLS SOLUTION

As with most things – you could take the principles contained in this article and produce one for yourself.

The problem with that is, if you are like most IHLs, you simply do not have time to do it.

Fortunately, and this is the point of the GLS Legal Operations Centre, we have developed a world class “ready to go” LDSC that you can quickly customise and implement into your business ecosystem.

The GLS Legal Dept. Service Charter™ has been developed by former GCs, Board Directors and C-Level executives to be functional, understandable and provide a clear and authoritative charter for your IHL.

GLS Legal Dept. Service Charter™ will help you:

• clearly and authoritatively delineate your IHL’s domains of responsibility
• capture your IHL’s authority within your business
• set the terms of engagement for your business
• set clear expectations for your IHL
• help set the context for better prioritized decision making
• help transform your legal function to a “New Law” footing
• optimize the utilization of your budget and resources
• deliver better results for your internal clients
• get better recognition for the results that you deliver to your internal clients
• get serious about your transformation agenda.
   

This solution is a simple and highly impactful combination of solution design modules, best practices and implementation support.

The resourcing of legal departments traditionally centered around full-time staff and more recently, in limited instances, part-time lawyers – (onsite lawyers weren't typically available in fractional quantities).

While legal personnel remain the most potent of all legal dept. resources - it also is an expensive resource category that historically has not been easy to mobilise or scale to meet variable and strategic needs.

While a number of prominent “flexible” legal resourcing providers have emerged, they typically only serve Big Law clientele on longish term mandates at expensive rates, whilst offering little strategic agility.

Reliable access to strategically agile and dynamic legal personnel resources is now an accepted tenet of “new law” operations – as no static team can do it all, all the time.

In this white paper, we analyse the criticality of legal personnel, historic mobilisation challenges, and now, just how easy it is for your legal team to deploy strategically agile legal personnel resourcing.  

Access world class legal department talent in 3 min - GLS Legal Manpower™

GLS ISSUE INSIGHT

A good in-house team gets things done, communicates, makes peace, offers insights, leads, inspires, spreads calm, reads & recalls everything, picks its battles, takes risks and retains its personality.

Traditionally, the response of the traditional in-house lawyer ("IHL") to increased workflows has been to seek out extra “legal hands” – which makes sense unless you need a bulldozer for 5 min rather than a lot of people with shovels for years...

Sadly, a significant number of GCs still maintain a relatively fixed view of legal personnel resourcing models.

Such models that are increasingly outdated and preventative of legal function optimisation and transformation.

Whilst most GCs agree that IHLs are increasingly challenged by highly volatile demand for both capacity and capability, many still maintain a very static talent bench - a structural legacy from their law firm days.

The net result is, as we all know, a systemic condition where IHL teams are chronically overworked, forced to unnecessarily outsource work and generally fail to be as responsive as the business would like.

While personnel potency can be enhanced via legal transformation (i.e. lawyers + legal tech), our macro focus here is on how businesses can deploy more agile and scalable legal resourcing strategies.

Relaxing the fixed view of legal talent management can be key to departmental transformation – as has been well demonstrated in many other specialist business departments.

Let’s take a look at the IT Department:

Many CIO functions will reserve around 30% of their overall “head count” budget to bring in “contingent talent". This is seen as critical, as it allows for more agile and dynamic responses to business needs.

IHLs have in part used this model via law firm secondees, but typically only for major project/overflow scenarios and not as a more permanent means of meeting the more strategic requirements of the team.

Traditionally though it has been very difficult for IHLs to deploy a dynamic, agile and scalable legal personnel strategy due to the myriad of associated challenges.

Let’s now examine these challenges:

LEGAL PERSONNEL OPTIMISATION OBSTACLES

Legal personnel resourcing was recently described by one of our new GC level clients as the

“Alpha Romeo of the legal resource world – expensive, everyone wants one, but hard to keep on the road..."

Whilst many in the profession might not appreciate comparison with a sports car of questionable reliability, this GC was using humour to acknowledge the perennial challenges of legal resourcing.

Looking through the lens of the IHL ecosystem, the challenges associated with this category of IHL resource, over and beyond strict headcount restrictions that most organisations face, include:

• Lead Time: it generally takes a significant lead time to hire and integrate new recruits
• Culture: getting the right fit for a team is a massive hiring challenge
• Recruitment Cost: using recruitment firms is hugely expensive
• Attractiveness: the budgets of many businesses don’t extend to attracting the very best legal talent
• Pressurised: the IHL context is increasingly pressurised as workflow outstrips IHL capacity
• Retention: IHL retention rates are moving increasingly towards that of private practice
• Motivation: progression and remuneration pathways are far more limited than in private practice
• Knowledge: no lawyer knows everything and what he/she knows is always a subset of the organisation’s needs
• Scalability: it is tough to scale a lawyer, often “1 lawyer only equals 1 hour”
• Full Cost: traditionally you could not access a fraction of a lawyer
• Location: many IHLs are limited to a particular physical location
• Shortages: there is a big shortage of 3-5 PQE lawyers, the point where value and price are thought to best co-exist
• Reluctance: rarely are probation exit rights exercised, even in the face of early negative performance
• Morale: until you get the personnel strategy right, team morale typically takes a hit

Yet, despite all of these issues, the criticality of legal department personnel remains unquestioned - and rightly so.

In light of the above, it is not difficult to see why developing a strategically agile, potent, focused, scalable and cost-effective legal personnel strategy has proved so elusive.

Until recently, the 3 ways you could address your legal personnel requirements were as follows:

Direct Hires

See the above challenges of direct hires – the process is frequently neither easy nor quick, even if you don’t suffer from headcount restrictions.

Even with great due diligence and significant effort the risk of bad / mediocre hires remains significant.

Your Panel Law Firm

If your corporate law department was big enough and you had a panel-type system in place, you could request a secondee.

However, law firms don’t like to fill short term secondments and if they do so, it is with the expectation of future work. There is also a difficult post-secondment transition, as the secondee’s costs can change from a stable wage to nearly $600+ per hour overnight.

Small detail - the majority of the world's businesses do not have "panels".

Big Law Body Shops

Many legal personnel resourcing platforms do offer "flexible resources", but such platforms are typically only accessible by "Big Law" type clients.

They have a minimum duration of engagement (typically 3 weeks), can cost more than law firms and take time to mobilise.

If you are the 5% of businesses that make up Big Law’s client base, then this might be attractive – but it does not deliver strategic agility to most businesses.

None of these options offer real respite to the deluge of, frequently short-notice, need for skills or capacities required to enable business needs and to keep your internal team focused on strategic matters.

Like plaque building up in the veins over time – every micro-support requirement that goes unmet adds pressure to the capacity and morale within your IHL team, and taxes overall operating performance.

Fortunately the GLS Group, through a combination of blue-chip talent, superior business process and technology, enables you to turn legal personnel resourcing into a powerfully strategic and agile tool.

“GLS can give you access to world class
in-house legal personnel in as little as 3 minutes, for
assignments as small as 4 hours, at a cost likely to be
less than your own full-time staff… all done online.”

THE GLS SOLUTION

GLS Legal Manpower™ gives you near instantaneous access to the legal personnel you need to become a better legal team - whether for overflow scenarios or more strategic department transformations.

Any IHL team can now instantly and disruptively (in terms of accessibility, usability and price) meet their legal personnel requirements in a strategically agile way characterised by:

• Speed: you can access our lawyers in as little a 3 minutes
• Choice: choose from GCs, Senior & Junior Counsel, Contract Managers, Legal Operations & Paralegals
• Skills: a diverse range of skills, including specialist in-house skills, legal tech and legal operations
• Transformation: you can access the talent that enables the transformation of your legal function
• Supported: our personnel operate from a global platform dedicated to legal operations and come to you with that perspective - they represent far more than just a warm body
• Tools: our personnel have access to many of the 273+ productivity tools in the GLS Legal Operations Centre, to make them more effective in your service
• Onsite/Offsite: our personnel are available both remotely and onsite in 23+ countries 
• Burst Capacity: whether you need 1 hour of lawyering or 100 hours of lawyering in 1 hour
• Micro Projects: our lawyers are near instantly available for projects as small as 4 hours - a totally new market option
• Mega Projects: major cross border teams can be assembled in record time
• Experience: most of our lawyers have 5+ years’ experience
• Simplicity: you can submit a work request online, and in under 2 minutes
• Location: our personnel are available globally - whether you need them onsite, offsite or both
• Pricing: our lawyers are likely to cost less than the fully loaded cost of your own IHLs 
• Interchangeable: we will replace any of our lawyers for any reason to ensure the right fit
• Poachable: if you really want to hire our lawyers – ask them nicely – we do not obstruct this
• No strings: unlike law firms, there are no expectations attached 
• Continuity: your working relationship with our lawyers can continue as long as you like

GLS Legal Manpower™ gives you access to the legal personnel you need, when you need them – allowing you to deliver a strategic, agile and potent legal personnel strategy and circumvent historic challenges.

By building a strategically agile component into your legal personnel resourcing strategy, your IHL team will be better able to progress effectively through the transformation process as seen below:

CONCLUSION 

Whilst most GC’s believe in the case for transformation, less than 25% of IHL teams have actually begun that journey.

Legal personnel are a vital category of legal resources and will remain so forever. However, numerous traditional obstacles have prevented them from being available as a strategically agile resourcing category.

Through GLS Legal Manpower™, those obstacles are removed and with that, IHL teams are presented with a quick transformation "win" – and an easy shift to strategic, agile and potent resourcing.

GLS Legal Manpower™ gives you the opportunity to empower your legal personnel strategy into a realm where agile resourcing extends well beyond filling “operational gaps" and becomes core to strategic need.

Most businesses globally can unleash the value contribution of efficient legal personnel resourcing in a zero-fuss manner – they just need to visit the GLS Legal Operations Centre.

GLS Legal Manpower™ gives you finger tip access to world class in-house legal personnel in as little as 3 minutes, for assignments as small as 4 hours, and at a cost likely to be less than your own full-time staff… 

Legal Service Request Forms (“LSRF”) – the basis upon which you take instructions from your business – are one of the most potent “efficiency” enablers available to IHLs.

The LSRF is not just a shield to protect against “garbage in and garbage out’, it can be uniquely tasked to generate powerful data to help support and optimise your legal operational decisions.

Sadly, too few IHLs leverage the transformative power of this simple tool, despite it costing almost nothing to implement, and it being the gatekeeper to enhanced legal operation performance.

This article explores the costs of not implementing a LSRF, the criticality of its role to legal function transformation, and how quick and easy it is for your team to harness its benefits.

GLS ISSUE INSIGHT

Like most IHLs, you may find yourself servicing a non-stop flow of support requests that leave little time for you to step back and strategise how to move to a more optimal mode of operating.

Legal function optimisation requires strategic, potent and data driven interventions to maximise the productivity of finite resources and to evidence underlying function value.

This process starts by building up a crystal-clear picture of what the business:

1. expects you to do (i.e. your domain responsibility); and
2. is actually requesting you to do on a day to day basis.

Whilst we will cover “domain responsibility” in the future, this article spotlights the huge “productivity” enablers available by improving your approach to taking and analysing “actual” client requests.

Before offering tips on the incredible efficiencies and insights that LSRF enabled client engagement brings, lets quickly revisit the price that IHLs pay for not putting in place self-authored LSRFs.

CONSEQUENCES OF UNDERLYING PROBLEM

"Time spent interpreting "bad instructions" can be one of the greatest inefficiencies experienced by in-house lawyers."

 

IHLs that do not utilise a LSRF-based protocol for taking instructions from their business, are likely to face some, if not all, of the following challenges and suffer the resulting diminished team performance:

• Instruction Quality: incomplete, low quality instructions that you spend valuable time clarifying

• Workflow Allocation: inability to more efficiently leverage optimal work type / SLA prioritisation

• Responsiveness: reduced ability to build capacity to respond to urgent matters

• Forecasting: inability to effectively forecast workflows/man-hour support requirements

• Resource identification: reduced ability to assess and forecast team skill/resource requirements

• Self Help Resources: inability to drive internal client users towards self-help resources

• Resource Stretch: chronic resource stretch and consequently low team morale

• Client Satisfaction: generally lower than desired internal client satisfaction levels

• Transformation: limited collection of data to author/ justify your transformation agenda

Without LSRFs, work requests arrive via a deluge of emails, WhatsApps, voice mails, corridor conversations, etc, which are typically late, short on detail, and require significant clarification.

Most likely, you mobilise on the basis of a mix of FIFO and “oiling the wheel that squeaks the loudest” – creating manic operating conditions, where you are always busy but always on the back foot.

This operating model no longer “cuts it” – either for you, or for your internal client. Being too busy to become less busy is not sustainable.

So, how can the LSRF help?

BENEFITS IF PROBLEM IS SOLVED WELL

As we say at GLS, many times a day, “simplicity is the best antidote to complexity”.

Implementing LSRFs is the simple solution to significantly eliminate and/or mitigate most of the above drivers of legal operation inefficiencies.

Here are just a few of the benefits of implementing a LSRF into your legal ecosystem:

• Quality Instructions: a dramatic boost in the quality of your instructions

• Productivity: more impactful use of legal team capacity as less time is spent clarifying instructions

• Basic KPI’s: data driven insights on fundamental team performance data

• Enhanced KPI’s: ability to add on more detailed data requests going forward

• Resourcing: data driven insights into future resourcing requirements of the team

• Formative Advice: asking the correct questions early delivers more effective advisory outcomes

• Automation: potential to automate the instruction process (eg host on intranet)

• Centralisation: all instructions are received via the same “ingress” point, enabling effective oversight

• Tasking: greater scope to match tasks to team capabilities and work loads

• Prioritisation: data driven ability to more efficiently prioritise work tasks

• Resource Forecasting: greater data on work type & capacity forecasting

• Analytics: IHLs can better understand and respond to workflow/busyness patterns

• Validation: ability to objectively demonstrate IHL’s contributions via empirical data

• Transparency: clearer insights into each team member’s workloads

• Budgeting Legitimacy: legal budget requests can increasingly be supported by hard data

• IHL Relief: IHLs gain respite from the pressures of ad-hoc/low quality support requests

• Standard Definition: establishing a LSRF helps you think about defining IHL SLAs

• Customer Services: LSRF promotes an internal customer service mentality

• Saves Client Time: the internal client knows exactly what is needed to mobilise IHLs

• Improved Quality: better instruction inputs drives better IHL support outputs

• IHL Morale: is improved as workflows/contributions become verifiable matters

• Client Satisfaction: internal clients are reassured about improving team service

In short, the case for implementing the LSRF is as overwhelming.

Let’s now look at the essential elements that should go into a basic LSRF deployment

 

LEGAL SERVICES REQUEST FORMS

“An effective LSRF delivers a quality instruction that allows IHLs to efficiently mobilise whilst generating valuable legal operations data to drive ongoing legal function improvements.”

The LSRF data included by organisations may differ, but at a minimum it must allow that organisation, in its own unique way, to achieve the above stated outcomes at a pace their organisation can handle.
 

At a bare minimum, the LSRF (for non-litigation instructions) should include the following data points:

Client: who is the underlying client requesting support (eg business unit)

Contact: who to contact in connection with the instruction

Deliverable(s): what specific deliverables are being sought

Parties: ID and contact details of any counterparties

Background: essential background information

Documentation: attach all relevant documentation

Deadline: a realistic date by when a response is required

Red Flags: any instruction related sensitivities to be observed

Obviously, the more data you capture at the point of instruction the more insights/efficiencies can be derived. However, the maturity of your internal client will positively correlate with LSRF sophistication.

The LSRF can reside on any number of effective mediums – whether an intranet portal, Microsoft Form, Spring CM task card or simple Word Doc -but in all cases it should create an e-record.

Enabling LSRF’s via “e-forms” is critical to compressing the time internal clients spend generating instructions - the use of checklists, drop-down menus also help drive the precision of the instruction.

SO, WHY DON’T YOU HAVE ONE?

We observe that over 80% of organisations do not regularly use a formal LSRF process.

Given that LSRFs can be so effective, why aren’t more IHLs adopting them?

Some oft-cited reasons for not adopting such tools include:

• Overlooked: many legal functions perpetuate existing practices so may not have thought of it

• Culture Change: the client will see this as an additional burden (they always say that!)

• Lack of Time: you need to stop, think and prepare the LSRF – this does take time

• Reference Models: what should the LSRF actually look like?

• Data Capture: how much is too little or too much instruction related data to be requesting?

• Scepticism: scepticism that such a tool can be formulated and deliver substantive benefits

The reality is that all IHLs want better quality instructions and all IHLs are under pressure to perform more productively.

So the above excuses no longer represent justifiable reasons for not implementing your own LSRF.

THE GLS SOLUTION

GLS has developed a world class, fully worked up suite of “off the shelf” LSRF’s that IHLs can quickly customise and implement into their business environment, all for just USD99.

GLS Legal Services Request Form™ includes both a basic and an advanced LSRF allowing you to simply select what is most suitable for you and your unique organisation.

This solution allows you to instantly and qualitatively improve your business’s engagement process, make better use of your limited available resources and improve your legal team's outputs.

This solution will allow you to better track, record and report inbound instructions for legal support, thereby capturing important data for budget defenses / transformation agenda advocacy.

Critically, our solution allows you to implement a vital enabler for IHL transformation – the ability to generate performance data to take greater control over your future.

And, as with all GLS solutions, this tool includes guidance and support on how to effectively implement it into your business ecosystem (including change management guidance).

GENTLE INTRODUCTION

The Contracting Policy ("CP") is perhaps the simplest and most potent efficiency initiative that any IHL can instigate – it is easy to implement and drives verifiable efficiencies across the entire contracting process.

Given the criticality and visibility of contracting in any organisation, this is an area where IHLs can garner “big wins” and the support of the wider business as they transform their operations.

Sadly, the absence of a comprehensive CP is yet another classic case of the In-House Community being too busy to find the time to become less busy.

Fortunately, this no longer need be the case.

This article explores the massive inefficiencies caused by the lack of a CP, the benefits of getting your CP right and how quickly you can implement one to drive optimal contracting within your organisation.

CONTEXT

Contracting is critical to all businesses. As a business enabling corporate instrument it can drive significant competitive advantages to businesses that do it well, whilst driving greater value recognition for the IHLs that make it work.

Contracting helps businesses secure new revenues, partners, products, markets, funds and IP whilst also supporting compliance activities.

If there was any doubt about this – you only have to consider the number of critical business processes that are impacted by contracting – See GLS Top 10 Work Horse Contracts

It is also the legal department’s most visible support function.

"Yet all too often corporate contracting occurs in a haphazard, uncoordinated, undisciplined manner that results in sluggish contract closure times, sub-optimally performing contracts and frequently, criticism of legal department support."

 

Yet, most organisations (in excess of 80%) do not have a single organization wide contracting policy to support their contracting function – instead they rely on a hotchpotch of informally maintained positions.

To overcome this, IHL’s must themselves take the responsibility for defining clear and succinct rules of engagement when contracting with third parties.

Before offering tips on the incredible efficiencies that a Contracting Policy can bring, lets quickly revisit the price IHLs pay for not putting in place self-authored Contracting Policy in place.

CONSEQUENCES OF UNDERLYING PROBLEM

By not defining your own organization wide contracting policy, you are likely to face any, if not all, of the following challenges:

Inconsistency - potential for your teams to take ad hoc and inconsistent position on the same issues

Orientation – no defined position means that the organsiations lacks a consistent basis for review

Legal Risk – legal risk profile inconsistencies as team members exercise discretion on legal risk issuesTool production – an inability to efficiently develop new tools to improve your contracting function

Leverage & Delegation – an inability to leverage up juniors and/or delegate contracting cycle roles

Training – an inability to engage in highly practical training with actual quality contracting assets

Inefficient queries – your legal team has to field often-repeated, avoidable, user queries

Improvement – an inability to benchmark performance and actively improve contracting performance

Coordination – your team is susceptible to “divide & conquer” as you lack a clear policy position

Legal Tech – an inability to properly utilize new legal technologies as these rely on the rules set out in your essential policy assets (which are not available)

Reputation – an inability to utilize efficient contracting to boost organization (and legal team) reputation

Costs – excessive legal consultant costs due to your inability to offer efficient legal position briefingsPerformance – your ad hoc approach to contracting results in sub-optimal contracting performance

Despondency – the internal client is regularly frustrated with the quality of IHL support

Legal Operations – are denied an coherent and transparent basis for assessing contracting function performance

"The bottom line is that an inability to access a consistent organization wide contracting position causes huge inefficiencies across every aspect of the contracting function – it effectively suffocates the prospects of efficiency."

BENEFITS OF THE CONTRACTING POLICY

Implementing your own contracting policy significantly eliminates and/or mitigates most of the above issues.

In particular, by utilising an effective Contracting Policy you will experience:

Faster contracting – contracting moves more efficiently without the need for continual clarification

Team unity – all members of your contracting team have a common position to secure

Review quality - contract reviews become an objective matter of compliance with contract policy

Empowerment - your legal team and the internal client are empowered to do more for themselves

Cost efficiencies – if external counsel support is required, it is obtained as efficiently as possible

Risk profile – you increasingly engender a more consistent, and desirable organisational legal risk profile

Reduced escalation – legal can focus on genuinely counterparty issues, not standard positions

Benchmarking – you know have a basis for benchmark your overall approach to contracting

Team satisfaction – morale improves as team members are empowered to move matters forward

Leveraged performance –junior team members (and commercial personnel) can safely achieve more themselves

IHL Value recognition - IHL team is viewed as a business enabler rather than as a choke point.

Less Errors - reduced human error as IHLs need not rely on imperfect memory

Legal Tech – the essential legal policy positions to effectively enable legal tech becomes available

KPIs – objective and sensible KPIs that can be developed to defend your budget and demonstrate ROI

In short, the IHL team is better placed than ever to fulfill its essential mandate which is to (i) be a guardian of legal risks, and (ii) promote the commercial interests of the business.

TRANSFORMATION CORNERSTONE

The benefits of having a Contracting Policy are quite literally innumerable – but perhaps the most potent point to make is that without it your contracting function can never be truly optimized.

To demonstrate the criticality of a Contracting Policy to the optimal performance of a contracting function, the below diagram shows the powerful efficiency “ripple effect” of this essential legal dept. policy asset.

There is simply no part of the contracting process that is not improved through the use of a high quality Contracting Policy asset.

This makes it the perfect foundation stone of any contacting function transformation exercise.

Note that the CP is also an enabler of formidable legal tech tools (e.g. contract automation and A.I. review tools). So, if you have not developed your CP then you cannot optimize such tools.

SO, WHY DON’T YOU HAVE ONE?

Given that a CP is a powerful initiative that any team could itself implement – i.e. it is an easy "win" – why do so few IHLs have a single, defined, organisation-wide CP?

The most cited reasons for not having a Contracting Policy in place include:

• Time: self-authoring such a policy asset carries a significant internal time cost for already busy teams
• Herding cats: getting a legal team, let alone an entire organisation, onto the same page is not easy
• Reference Points: an inability to efficiently access reference points as to what should be included
• Reference Models: what should the policy look like?
• Doubt: concerns over whether getting agreement on a single position is possible
• Overlooked: the impact of policy on overall contracting function performance has been overlooked
• Complexity: certain IHLs misconceive that their contracting needs are too diverse and complicated to be captured in a single document
• Jurisdictions: the misconception that operating across borders means standard positions aren’t possible
• History: like most things in the legal industry – lawyers tend to embrace change glacially
• Fear: will it work?, no longer do any of the above reasons represent an obstacle to the efficient implementation of your organisations contracting policy.

GLS has done the hard work for you!

THE GLS SOLUTION

GLS has developed a world class, fully worked up, “off the shelf” policy asset, that IHLs can take, customise and use as the basis for their Contracting Policy – this is qualitative, quick and cost-effective lawyering.

GLS Contracting Policy™ develops an aligned view of your business's contracting policy - making better, faster, cheaper and safer contracting possible.

By way of guidance, a very "casual"/easy to accommodate project timeline for implementing GLS Contracting Policy™ would be 4 weeks – with only a handful of hours required from your in-house team.

GLS Contracting Policy™ releases powerful efficiencies into every stage of the commercial contracting process – from drafting, negotiation and closure to training and administration.  

Prepared with the "user" in mind, GLS Contracting Policy™ is a tool that is as practical as it is functional, and which is easy to maintain.

GLS Contracting Policy™ delivers unprecedented legal resource optimisation and more efficient legal risk management – and most importantly, an inbuilt feedback mechanism ensures it is always improving.  

CONCLUSION

The contracting function is a critical and highly visible role performed via IHLs. It presents a unique opportunity to deliver noticeable improvements to how your internal clients are served.

The Contracting Policy asset will, as a matter of fact, determine the quality of ALL of your contracting resource elements.

A continued disregard for the importance of a Contracting Policy to overall function performance will only fetter the the ability of your contracting function to perform at optimal levels.

The question now is simply – are you ready to implement a contracting policy of your own?

In-house legal teams (IHL) have for years universally agreed that law firms must drastically change the way they operate if they are to be a sustainable and valued support construct for IHLs – but little has changed.

Despite the deafening roar of IHL demands for “value”, law firms have proved intractable – conceding only tokens of “renovation” (e.g. contract lawyers), and not real “innovation” – a sharp focus on value building.

While customers drive change, including in the legal industry, IHLs must accept that merely demanding “value” is not enough – they must define value, communicate it, insist on it, and performance manage it.

While it is all well to criticise external counsel about their inefficient performance, if IHLs have not set the bar in terms of what they expect, then they too are part of the problem. Most IHLs do not do this.

Going into 2020, all IHL teams using external counsel regularly must look for ways to move their relationships with law firms onto a performance managed basis for the fuller “value” expression to emerge.

This article explores the problems caused by poorly performing law firm relationships, the benefits of getting it right, and how you can quickly implement a performance managed relationship with law firms.

REWARD FOR EFFORT: NOT SO REWARDING

Most IHLs report that they would like to use law firms more frequently but find that law firms are too slow to mobilise, often miss the mark, and cost too much. This is a poor outcome for all parties.

“Clearly, the traditional construct for law firm engagements is not delivering IHLs what they need.”

The notion that legal procurement is so special that it need not conform with typical “procurement best practices” is rapidly losing traction inside most corporates. Value definition in advance is essential.

A customer seeking upfront clarity on deliverables, price, delivery and usability assurance and strong contract/ relationship management are near widely accepted basic procurement principles.

Regrettably, the “reward for effort” (i.e. hourly rate) models of law firms have inculcated a reluctance to ceding to expectations that these widely accepted procurement principles should be observed by law firms.

To overcome this, IHL’s must themselves take the responsibility for defining clear and succinct rules of engagement for their external law firms, which embody their own procurement and value principles.

Before offering tips on what a “value creating” construct with a law firm looks like, lets quickly revisit the price IHLs pay for not putting in place self-authored Guidelines For External Counsel.

THE CONSEQUENCES

Whilst we cannot cover all of the consequences that flow from the absence of a “performance managed” construct with law firms, we have picked on the major areas of blowback experienced by IHLs.

Costs

By not defining your own protocol for cost management (e.g. acceptable and permitted rates / charging / billing / costs) you are likely to face challenges associated with:

• Bill size – not only eye watering, but frequently in excess of the initial quote
• Billing transparency – sparse/opaque work descriptions make bill validation difficult
• Bill reconciliation – extensive time is required to check narratives, rates, disbursements, etc
• Resource depletion – external counsel fees consume available IHL budget at a disproportionate rate
• Outdated practices & inefficiencies – you see little evidence of efficiency tools and practices usage
• AWOL expertise – the “expert” firm you appointed seems to engage in excessive research
• Resource overlap – multiple lawyers spending time on the same matter/task without explanation
• Unique disbursements - lawyers on your matter all seem to eat at Nobu after 6pm with a taxi home
• Cost forecasting – your actual external costs are outstripping the forecasted costs
• Painful conversations – “billings” conversations overshadow what should be a trusted relationship

 

Value articulation

Engaging any kind of external resource requires precise articulation of the “value” yield in advance.

By not defining your own protocol around “value”, you are likely to face challenges associated with:

• Opaque deliverables – very few objective deliverables are being offered to you
• Reward for effort – you are paying for effort (including a firm fixing its own errors), not outcomes
• Advice usability – you receive “law reviews” instead of the “practical” advice you want
• Unhelpful metrics – the only performance metric you are offered are hours consumed
• Knowledge transfer – few of your assignments result in objective knowledge transfer to your team
• Business knowledge – counsel are not putting much effort in to understanding your business
• Team improvement – few strategies are being offered to help upskill and improve your team
• Performance management – law firms do not typically performance manage client accounts
• Cross pollination – you are not being offered learnings from the law firm’s other clients
• Expert experience – you are not benefitting from firms telling you what has worked best in the past

 

Responsiveness

Most matters that relate to mobilising a law firm can and should be capable of agreement in advance. By not defining your own protocol around engagement matters, you are likely to face challenges with:

• Delaying engagement – due to their burn rate – you are tempted to delay law firm involvement
• Time to engage – even if you want to engage, it takes too much time to mobilise counsel
• Sluggish mobilisation – law firms requiring unnecessary information / detail
• Conflict clearance – conflict clearances generally take far too long
• Partner bottlenecks – law firm remuneration issues often present keyhole access to wider resources
• Reporting – you find yourself chasing law firms for updates, not the other way around
• Reactive advisory – firms only do what you tell them rather than tell you what you need / works best

Partnership

A true partnership is two or more parties working in unison towards a common goal. How can “reward for effort” ever be aligned with your objective of “achieving more with less, better, faster and cheaper”?

Failing to spell out what you expect from your law firm in terms of partnering with you means you are likely to face challenges with:

• Trusted advisory – you want long term trusted advisory, but you only get “rented advisory”
• Pay or pause engagement – unless you are paying, firms do not seem to want to engage
• Narrow shoulders – firms tend only do what you ask them to do and what you will pay for
• Blinkered Delivery - firms are not looking to see how they can also support your broader team agenda
• Unmotivated – firms that are not offered incentives to be holistically engaged are less likely to do so
• Confusion - counsel is likely unclear about what you are actually looking for and act accordingly
• Validation - firms validate their contribution by profits, not how well you realised your goals
• Alignment - you want a good job done efficiently – law firms want scope creep
• Enabled advisory - you to know what you can do and how, you want to know what you cannot do or why you cannot

BENEFITS OF A ROBUST RELATIONSHIP CONSTRUCT

Implementing your own engagement protocol significantly eliminates and/or mitigates most of the above issues together with a whole host of other issues we have not had time to cover in this short article.

With the right relationship scaffolding in place, your relationship with external counsel can deliver positive results in the following areas:

• Trusted advisory - your lawyers can increasingly serve you as trusted advisors and not meter maids
• Better procurement - knowing precisely what you want delivers better procurement choices
• Cost control - eliminate unauthorised costs and improve integrity of cost forecasting/management
• Value - clearer articulation of business enabling support you expect to receive and verification you got it
• Knowledge Transfer - greater knowledge transfer into your team
• Business enabling advice - greater contribution by counsel to “business enablement”
• Agility - faster and more responsive mobilisation – getting you the support when you need it
• Client knowledge - counsel start to advise from a deepening understanding of your business
• Reporting - clearer and more succinct lines of communication across matters & the relationship
• Faster payments - law firms can get paid faster
• Smoother relationship - discussions around dashed expectations diminish
• Performance management - that delivers constant and measurable improvement, not just a lunch
• Motivated counsel - counsel that are incentivised to deliver value across a broad front

In short, an “informed environment is a controlled environment” and unless you inform counsel about how you want your affairs managed, you will continue to be trapped in the sticky “reward for effort” web.

SO, WHY DON’T YOU HAVE ONE?

The new “value building” construct between IHLs and law firms must be defined by IHL teams themselves – and let’s be honest – Law Firms aren’t falling over themselves to move you away from reward for effort.

This “ownership” proposition makes an abundance of sense, as it is the increasingly complex agenda of IHLs that must be supported through prioritised allocations of scare resources.

The most cited reasons for not having external counsel guidelines in place include:

• Time: self-authoring such a policy asset carries a significant internal time cost for busy teams
• Reference Points: an inability to efficiently access reference points as to what should be included
• Reference Models: what should the policy look like?
• Doubt: concerns whether law firms would accept such guidelines given the value of your account
• Overlooked: the idea of performance managing a law firm had simply been overlooked
• History: like most things in the legal industry – lawyers tend to embrace change glacially
• Fear: will it work?

Interestingly around 85% of our client base historically did not have such policies in place and those that did reported that it was produced at huge internal time cost to their teams.

Fortunately, no longer do any of the above reasons represent an obstacle to the efficient implementation of a performance managed construct between you and your law firms. GLS has done the hard work for you!

THE GLS SOLUTION

GLS has developed a world class, fully worked up, “off the shelf” policy asset, that IHLs can take, customise and use as the basis for their law firm relationships – qualitative, quick and cost-effective.

GLS’ Guidelines for External Legal Counsel™ delivers you a comprehensive, world class policy instrument covering a wide range of best practices to help performance manage your external counsel relationships.

Guidelines for External Legal Counsel™ is predicated on a good relationship construct being one that delivers performance and budgetary certainty, with tangible value creation that transfers back to your organisation.

Covering 37 unique policy and/or process considerations, Guidelines for External Legal Counsel™ enables you to build effective relationships which support a wide range of IHL team objectives on optimised terms.

Realistically, unless you can magically find the time to produce this vital policy asset – you are unlikely to implement it. Our solution gives you a complete policy that you can quickly customise, for just USD999.

Indeed, the cost of implementing your own law firm guidelines based on GLS’s Guidelines For External Counsel™ will be recovered multiple times over from the savings secured on your subsequent legal bills.

If you would like to see what the content for a world class Guidelines for External Counsel™ – you can view the table of contents for our solution RIGHT HERE.

Guidelines for External Counsel™: See Table of Contents here

 CONCLUSION

Improving the quality of your relationship with external counsel is not only about cost control, it is also about ensuring you receive demonstrable, on-point, and ideally recurring, value for your business.

The answer therefore lies in building up a clear understanding around what your IHL considers valuable and then enlisting your law firms in the process of joint goal realisation insofar far as they can contribute.

Expecting law firms to voluntarily offer a new basis for “value building” engagement is naïve. In “Law Firm Land” – widespread rises in PEP levels translates to a poor case for behavioural course correction.

IHLs that continue to resist implementing general procurement norms in their engagements with external counsel increasingly risk losing control of their procurement decisions.

GLS enables the IHL community to rapidly implement a performance managed framework that breathes a fresh air into the traditional law firm relationship while eliminating unacceptable inefficiencies.

In line with all our disruptive offerings, the cost of this solution is almost negligible and the only question an IHL team faces is “why haven’t you got on with it … your law firm certainly isn’t going to draft it for you.”

Think about the quality of cars, air travel, TVs, mobile phones, clothing, medicine … they’ve all gotten better, whilst becoming more cost accessible.

GLS is pleased to be able to show the world that technology is capable of achieving the same "better quality at lesser cost" outcome in the legal industry.

First, we automated world class legal documents and took them online for you to access any time and for around 50% of the cost that would be charged by a decent law firm.

NOW WE ARE DISRUPTING OUR OWN DISRUPTION

Now, within less than 8 months of launching GLS Legal Docs™, we have reworked our technology and refined our proposition.

Now, our growing range of world class legal docs costs around 10% of comparable market prices.

If we offer a legal doc through GLS Legal Docs™, there is now simply no more excuses for a bad version of that document to ever be circulated again!

Our world class online library of automated legal documents now includes:

• Basic legal Docs (e.g. board and shareholder resolutions) for US$19
• High Utility Commercial Docs (e.g. service agreements) for US$299
• Complex Policy Docs (e.g. privacy policies) for US$499

Regardless of the document type – it should always be GLS world class

TRY IT FOR YOURSELF

Well, it is at least true to say that “Legal Tech” is a theme that has been dominating news and thought in the legal industry of late.

After centuries of being some of the slowest adopters of technological innovation, it appears that we have finally reached a “turning point” such that Legal Tech will be a key force defining the next chapter of legal industry’s evolution.

In this article we will be focusing on what we consider to be one of the most promising areas of Legal Tech – contract review powered by artificial intelligence (“A.I.C.R.”).

A.I.C.R. is being widely touted as both the saviour of and end of the lawyer. We certainly have a view on which outlook is correct!

With all the hyperbole around we wanted to “cut through the fluff” and point to where the real innovation is happening and how that innovation can be most productively harnessed by in-house teams of any size.

So with this article we seek to give some:

• real insight into what is the current “state of play” of A.I.C.R. technology; and
• practical insight into how that technology can be incorporated into a lawyer’s day-to-day work.

Explaining the jargon

In the same way that the term “drone” seems to now refer to everything in the air that had previously been called a “remote controlled [x]” the term “A.I.” is being used so frequently now, that it is often hard to know what exactly is being talked about.

So for clarity, “A.I.” in the context of the Legal Tech being discussed in this article refers to the combination of 2 distinct technologies:

“Machine Learning” and “Natural Language Processing”

“Machine Learning” refers to a piece of software that can be taught/trained, without the need for explicit programming.

That is, the application is trained to look for patterns in data that it is presented with, and learn from those examples to increase the chances that its future decisions will be “better”.

In the context of Legal Tech this “learning” typically falls into the subsets of “supervised” and/or “reinforced” machine learning.

Meaning that the datasets presented to the software are “labelled examples” and ideal behaviours are reinforced within a specific context to maximise performance.

As an example, GLS LegalSifter (our A.I.C.R. solution) is presented with examples of “indirect liability” clauses (circa 10,000 examples) with the characteristics of a “successful outcome” being continuously identified and reinforced.

Natural Language Processing (“NLP”) refers to the interaction of computers and human language. With the objective of getting the software to read and ultimately “make sense” of human language in a valuable way.

This is a very hard thing to achieve. Overcoming the ambiguity and imprecise characteristics of human language is a difficult thing to translate into an algorithm.

However, NLP essentially boils down to applying algorithms to a language set in order to identify and extract the natural language “rules” that can be converted into a form that computers can understand.

The Result

By combining Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing together, A.I.C.R systems such as GLS LegalSifter result in software that is trained to look for and identify “legal concepts” and provide in context advice.

This is analogous to having an incredibly advanced version of the beloved “Ctrl + F” function.

The difference being that, for example, the software is not just looking for the words “indirect liability” but rather it is looking for anywhere where the “concept” of indirect liability appears (regardless of the specific words that are used to express it).

Other uses for A.I.

This article is about A.I. improving the efficiency of contract reviews / document analysis.

However, for the record it is also worth noting that many efforts are currently also being made to apply A.I. to:

• Due Diligence – i.e. performing due diligence with the help of AI tools to uncover background information.
• Litigation Analytics – i.e. using A.I. to provide statistical probability forecasts of litigation outcomes.
• Intellectual Property – i.e. using A.I. tools to analyse large IP portfolios and drawing insights from the content.
• Electronic Billing – i.e. using A.I. to compute lawyers’ billable hours and combat “time loss” (the bane of so many “traditional” firms).

Debunking some Common Myths

A.I. will replace lawyers	In the same way that the Excel spreadsheet did not replace accountants, A.I. is not a lawyer replacement. A.I. is a lawyer “enhancement” in that it is a tool to be used by lawyers to get more done better, safer, faster and cheaper.  The view taken with GLS LegalSifter is that a Lawyer + an Algorithm is better than either by itself.
A.I. is easy to use	Yes and No. Like driving a car - at first there are too many actions, too many instruments and too much to coordinate, but after some practice (ideally with an instructor) you have the car moving along effortlessly. Users will typically experience a productivity “J-Curve”. That is, their productivity will likely diminish the first few times they use an A.I.C.R. tool – as time will be spent learning how it works and how best to use it.  Ultimately however, systems like GLS LegalSifter are very easy to learn. So typically by the 5th / 6th document reviewed, users notice very significant productivity gains.
A.I. costs a fortune	Actually, yes it does... to develop. Making a good A.I. system is very difficult, very expensive and needs collaboration with a cutting edge institution of the likes of Carnegie Uni. However, the best A.I. systems (like GLS LegalSifter) are now being sold as SaaS. So set up, licensing fees, server capacity and maintenance are all available to “end users” for less than the cost of an Adobe product license.
A.I. can automate document production	No. Clever software engineering is used to create document automation (e.g. GLS Legal Docs). However, this is not “A.I.”. Rather “Automated Document Production” is created by "real lawyer intelligence" working with software engineers to design logic pathways + user interfaces + input criteria + predetermined outputs.
A.I. software is plug and play	Yes and No. A.I.C.R. systems like GLS LegalSifter can work “out-of-the-box”. However, it is most productive when you use it in coordination with your essential “low tech” contracting infrastructure.  So take the time to populate your A.I. system with your Group Legal Policies, Clause Banks and Playbooks – which if you do not already have – then you should.
Tech hyperbole generally	A.I. is “hot right now” and its promise for Legal Tech is very compelling.  However SaaS reps and marketers have, sometimes, also reached a point of self-caricature.  Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
A.I. can fix your contracting processes	A.I. as a tool is an “accelerator” or “enhancement” not a replacement of your legal review processes. If you have done the ground work to build good low-tech contracting infrastructure – A.I. will make these processes work faster and better. If your contracting processes and infrastructure are garbage - A.I. will just make that infrastructure produce garbage outcomes more quickly. Read THIS ARTICLE on how best to get your “low tech” right before your reach for the high tech.

A.I. vs Your Day-to-Day Operations?

In our experience, the businesses that have most effectively and productively incorporated A.I.C.R. into their contracting infrastructure have implemented at least 1 of the following process flows.

We believe that in the not-too-distant future, the vast majority of lawyers will never look at a complex document without the help of A.I.

Again, the point to emphasise here is that a Lawyer + A.I.C.R. is there to:

• ensure that nothing is missed - meaning that work can be delegated to more junior staff (or done by sleepless staff) to enhance margin but with the risk of “human error” being removed ;
• reduce the “review time” needed for a lawyer to physically get through a document. Thereby freeing that lawyer’s capacity to negotiate truly key issues and contribute strategically to driving the deal forward; and
• ensure that your contracting tools (e.g. Contracting Policy, Clause Bank, Playbook etc.) are efficiently and consistently applied across your contract portfolio – even when you are dealing with third party paper.

Is A.I. Worth It?

For better or worse (obviously for the better!), lawyers will not be eliminated anytime soon… 

However, A.I.C.R is increasingly becoming an indispensable tool for those lawyers because, realistically, the following benefits can’t be ignored:

• Consistent application of Group Legal and Compliance policies
• Shifts lawyer time from “issue spotting” to "risk assessment" and "strategic advisory"
• Significant reduction of time required to review documents and provide responses
• A.I. “learns” so retention and effective utilisation of “deal memory” is enhanced
• Significant reductions in human error
• Tools can be calibrated for both professional and non-professional users
• A.I. adopters better understand new contract support function which 
  increasingly is defined by A.I. tool competencies
• Enhanced junior & non lawyer training by providing instant "in context" advice

In summary, by helping lawyers sift through large amounts of data quickly and safely, A.I.C.R. systems such as GLS LegalSifter can enable lawyers to provide better client outcomes faster and therefore cheaper.

To help you assess whether those productivity gains are worth the costs of A.I.C.R. we include the below feedback from GLS LegalSifter for your consideration:

WHAT'S COVERED?

In-House Challenges and the RPLV Response

An introduction to the challenges faced by in-house lawyers and the Resources | Priority | Leverage | Validation (“RPLV”) decision-making framework to leverage team performance.

• In-house challenges
• RPLV Decision Making
• The New Law Legal Team

 

Speakers

This seminar will draw upon the experiences of these great speakers:

Matthew Glynn | Managing Director 

Matt is Managing Director of the GLS Group, a leading legal disruptor that delivers 24/7/365 access to world-class legal solutions. Solutions that enable in-house teams and law firms to achieve far greater productivity outcomes.

Be it by AI based contract reviews, contract automation solutions or by architecting high-performance legal teams, GLS Group provides access to world class solutions at a disruptive price point.

A former Big Law technology lawyer, Matt has been responsible for the development of 120+ technology enabled tools that extend what in-house legal resources can achieve. Matt is an industry leader in helping in-house teams achieve far greater performance outcomes with fewer resources. Matt regularly implements productivity solutions to legal teams of all sizes across the globe and has helped them achieve external legal budget compression ratios of 1:10 and time task compression ratios that routinely exceed 1:20.

Simon Bryan | Principal

Simon is a co-founder and principal of the GLS Group, a leading legal disruptor that delivers 24/7/365 access to world-class legal solutions. Solutions that enable in-house teams and law firms to achieve far greater productivity outcomes.

Be it by AI based contract reviews, contract automation solutions or by architecting high-performance legal teams, GLS Group provides access to world class solutions at a disruptive price point.

Prior to founding GLS, Simon was a partner in a leading global law firm where he built a pre-eminent TMT/IPT practice in the EMEA region.  Simon also held a number of prominent senior in-house roles, including the first Acting General Counsel of TwoFour 54, Director of Group Legal for one of the Dubai Holding Group entities (heading 49 group companies) and Chief Legal Officer & Director of Business Affairs at the Doha Film Institute.  Simon also founded a magazine distribution and publishing company in Hong Kong. 

One of the greatest sources of inefficiencies (and frustration) inside an In House Legal (“IHL”) team is the lack of a world-class legal template library, despite universal agreement on the benefits they deliver.

A standardised world-class legal template library is one of the single most productive resources that any IHL team can develop and yet most internal attempts to create one either fail or fall well short of the mark.

Law firms are engaged on an ‘as-needed’ basis to draft templates, but what is produced more often than not misses the mark and involves great expense. Or has your experience been different?

Regardless, in the context of transformation, IHL teams must again look at this category of critical legal resources and achieve maximum productivity leverage – ideally with a minimal resource commitment.

In this short blog article, we will share with you:

• a re-cap of the benefits of a best practice template library;
• what most IHL teams’ template libraries tend to look like;
• the 5 top reasons why most teams fail to develop a best practice template library;
• our Top 10 principles for developing a best practice legal template library;
• a premium audit tool that you can download (for free) to help you start to build your own world-class library; and
• how GLS can help you efficiently and effectively deliver a “World Class” library to your business.

If a world-class legal template library has eluded you – you are not alone. Nine out of ten IHL teams are dissatisfied with the performance of their legal template libraries - this blog tells you what you need to do.

The benefits and legal team transformation

Operating a best practice template library is quite simply a bedrock principle of any IHL team and is an essential step in an IHL team's transformation journey.

The benefits of maintaining such a library include:

• expedited contract generation which in turn delivers strategic deal momentum;
• high user familiarity, easy navigation and easy negotiation;
• driving a more consistent application of approved group legal policy principles;
• facilitating more consistent and leveraged training opportunities to up-skill users;
• becoming a single source of approved legal templates;
• providing greater risk mitigation control over 3rd party contracting scenarios;
• driving faster deal closure and more reliable contract administration with more contracts concluded in writing;
• the potential to leverage new contract automation and review technologies;
• significant reduction of the "lawyers time" spent assembling new agreements on a case-by-case basis; and
• setting the stage for exponentially greater legal team efficiencies.

In summary, its sets the scene for the delivery of “business enabling” contracting support – i.e. it helps your business get deals done better, faster, cheaper and safer.

See our recent Blog – Top 10 Legal Docs – The Workhorse for our analysis of the benefits of the kind of “business enabling” contracting that can drive legal team value recognition.

What do most template libraries look like?

Sadly, the vast majority of businesses are not operating best practice template libraries and the above benefits remain beyond their reach.

Indeed, most template libraries are characterised by:

• a mess of ad hoc templates pulled together from independent authors/sources of disparate quality;
• uncertainty amongst users as to what templates should be used in any given situation;
• templates that lack consistency across boilerplate, structure, clause progression and schedules – items that should usually stay the same across most contracts;
• templates that do not consistently give your business an “optimal” starting position;
• templates that cause negotiation drag as irrelevancies are needlessly reviewed and debated;
• templates requiring significant customisation before being ready for deployment, thus slowing down deal momentum;
• templates that are not balanced and so consistently take too long to agree with a counterparty;
• templates that are stored in multiple and decentralised locations resulting in inconsistent use or even non-use;
• too many variations of each legal agreement (e.g. different services agreements for each service scenarios when a single template would work for most scenarios);
• templates that have not been updated in a long a time, resulting in them being dated by reference to best practice, brevity, market practice, local law, etc; and
• templates that are not ready for automation or wider technology leverage.

Invariably, such template libraries fail to win the confidence of the business.

In the face of the above challenges, it is not uncommon for unapproved decentralised libraries to appear throughout a business and usurp the legal team altogether.

Why?

Given the irrefutable benefits that flow from a best practice template library, the obvious question that begs to be answered is:

“why are so many IHL teams unable to get around to implementing best practice template libraries?”

Well, the short answer is that in the “real world” of an IHL, the task of whipping templates into shape has historically never been an easy task.

The main reasons for the failure of a best practice template library to emerge are as follows:

1. Time: IHL teams are just too busy "being busy" and attending to "business as usual" to find the time to undertake this exercise – this is by far the number 1 reason and as more is expected from IHL teams, finding that "free time" becomes even more difficult;
2. External Cost: traditional law firms cost too much and have a propensity to complicate these types of assignments – especially when business is now demanding shorter templates that are easier to use;
3. Herding Cats: trying to get all internal stakeholders into the same room – let alone getting them onto the same page or aligned on the same clause – is a challenging exercise;
4. Legacy Issues: teams tend to inherit templates and changing them can frequently be a politicised event – the legal team boss or the affected business units actively resist change, being content with the “devil they know”; and
5. Policy Deficiency: 8 out of 10 IHL teams do not have a documented and standardised contracting policy that would provide the essential policy direction for a truly standardised template library.

If you are nodding your head in agreement with these reasons then, in our experience, you will be doing so alongside the vast majority of in-house lawyers.

The good news is that the GLS Legal Operations Centre is loaded with numerous solutions to the above challenges.

Before that though, we would like to share with you the Top 10 Rules that you can use to create your own template library.

Top 10 Rules For A World Class Legal Library

Here are our Top 10 Rules – the very same that we apply to the maintenance of our world-class, fully automated online legal libraries in the GLS Legal Operations Centre.

1. De minimis: a world-class library consists of the bare minimum number of templates needed to cover the 80% (volume/type) of contracting scenarios faced. More templates is not more – it often just leads to more mess.
2. Contracting Policy: your template library should deliver a uniform legal and compliance risk profile so you must have a documented “Contracting Policy” – without this your library will not be optimised or defined by reference to a common, authoritative standard.
3. Clause Bank: first into your library must be a Clause Bank that makes up 75% of any agreement – i.e. clauses that cover Boiler Plate, Interpretation, Legal and Definitions. Your Clause Bank must “bake in” your Contracting Policy.
4. Users: templates libraries must be built with the end user in mind – which is not always the legal team – it is often the commercial leads, the project implementers and the contract administrators. So keep your templates super simple.
5. Standardisation: standardisation drives a world-class library and should occur at every level of your templates - definitions, look & feel, numbering, structure, clause progression, boilerplate and schedule level should all be consistent;
6. Usage Rules: your library must include a fixed set of rules governing usage scenarios, access, legal review and editorial control … and in time, ideally, how the templates should be negotiated;
7. Centralisation: there should only be one legal template library in any organisation – the power of a “single source of the truth” is a great ally when delivering efficient, compliant and reliable contracting solutions;
8. Checklists: you do not always get to work on your own paper so for every contracting scenario where you cannot assert your own terms, you must have a potent checklist to efficiently review third-party paper;
9. Maintenance: your library must be built for maintenance efficiency – if you have leveraged the power of standardisation, edits can be efficiently propagated across a library and drive perpetual improvement; and
10. Technology: your legal templates must be prepared so that when the time is right – they can yield even greater efficiency outcomes by the use of technology – i.e contract automation, contract management systems, etc.

You and your library – what can you do?

In the context of IHL transformation – optimising the performance of your legal template library is now a must – its productivity "ripple effect" is immense, with many outcomes that can be empirically captured.

Accordingly, it is time for all IHL teams to develop strategies to improve the performance of their legal template libraries.

Here are 2 ways GLS can help you:

If You Do it Yourself:

Step 1: GLS Best Practice Library Checklist: if you wish to upgrade your templates yourself – please download our Best Practice Library Checklist (see download link below) - a tool that enables a detailed audit of key library assets.

Step 2: Visit the GLS Legal Operations Centre: to access a wide range of modular Template Libraries and solutions for every aspect of assembling a world-class legal template library.

These solutions will massively reduce the time, cost and effort required to create your own best practice template library.

• GLS Contracting Policy™: your business’s contracting positions across all key legal risk provisions all in 1 document.
• GLS Clause Bank™: a repository of approved contractual clauses to cover 75% of any agreement, that precisely reflect your legal & compliance requirements.
• GLS Checklists™: a comprehensive checklist of essential issues, making rapid review of third-party paper a truly simple task.
• GLS Playbook™: a contracting support tool that instantly equips your contract negotiators with a world-class knowledge of i) how each key clause works, and ii) how to effectively negotiate those clauses with counter-parties.
• GLS Automation Readiness™: a proprietary methodology that leads you through the entire life-cycle of the automation process to help you achieve implementation success.

If You Let us Do It:

GLS can develop for you a customised world-class legal template library.

GLS has developed world-class template libraries for some of the largest MNCs globally. We utilise a bespoke methodology that allows for user-friendly templates to emerge.

Our products are rapidly emerging as the pre-eminent sources of truly world-class legal documents that can be accessioned online 24/7/365 at totally disruptive price points.

We now offer you the choice of:

• Full library access
• Access to specific categories of precedents
• Single precedents
• Supported Packages

In-house lawyers (“IHLs”) must verifiably deliver far more with far less, and in an overall climate where the business community they serve continues to question the tangible value they represent.

All too often you hear it said “Our business doesn’t need a lawyer because lawyers …

• … are just a cost centre that doesn’t make us money.”
• … don’t really contribute to the key aspects of the business.”
• … cannot help us achieve our corporate goals.”

IHLs must actively debunk such misconceptions if their full value expression is to be recognised, and if they are to set the scene for making the even greater strategic contributions now required.

This article seeks to aid this process by shining a much-needed light on the criticality of IHLs. We do this by viewing their role through the simple prism of a common IHL role - contracting support.

Some IHLs may not have a true sense of the value of their contract support role simply because it feels routine. This blog highlights the value of that role and The GLS Legal Template Solutions that allow IHLs to leverage it.

Key to vital business processes

Consider this: Critical work is not done by unimportant people.

As can be seen from the below infographic, within a typical business an IHL’s contract support role brings it into contact with more of the vital business processes than almost any other job function.

The potency of an IHL’s contracting can and does materially impact the ability of a business to initiate, sustain and optimise the vital business processes that drive overall business performance.

The correlation between the work of the IHL and business performance is direct and absolute - yet, value recognition for that role remains low.

Familiarity should breed authority, not contempt

Sadly, however, the above contracting scenarios are frequently considered “garden variety”, despite them relating to vital business processes, and this frequently leads to low IHL value recognition.

As such, it is critical that IHLs remind themselves (and their businesses) of the importance of the support they provide - if IHLs cannot appreciate what they do, then no one else will.

Our recent article Top 10 Legal Docs - The Work Horses looks at 10 common agreements whose business-criticality is unquestioned yet frequently overlooked.

Clearly not everything IHLs do is new, exciting and glamorous – but the criticality of the role, and the potential for additional strategic contribution, frequently resides in its “business as usual” nature.

To bear the point out, by supporting vital business processes of their business the importance and value of the IHL grows considerably as they:

• contribute to the architecture and implementation of almost all vital business processes;
• are proximate to and best understand those vital business processes;
• typically operate across and beyond the bounds of “business unit” and geography; and
• often acquire a more holistic understanding of the overall business.

The unique IHL vantage point affords insights, relationships, knowledge, mobility and visibility across the business which, if leveraged correctly, can allow for enhanced IHL strategic contributions.

Indeed, the ability to make even greater strategic contributions increases dramatically if an IHL is consistently recognised as delivering “business enabling” contracting support to their business.

Leveraging business-enabling legal contracting

A “business-enabling” approach to contracting is about delivering reliable contracting outcomes to a business in a better, faster, cheaper and safer manner.

The ability to deliver “business-enabling” contract support requires the use of world-class legal templates to drive a qualitative contracting experience that features:

• a clear and continued focus on desired outcomes – the “what are we trying to achieve” and creates the conditions needed for those outcomes to emerge;
• documents that are easy to work with – i.e. documents that can be understood, reviewed, amended and administered with ease;
• documents that set the deal up for success by being absolutely clear on each party’s respective rights and obligations;
• key-stakeholder time not being diluted by “white noise” issues/negotiations;
• external consultants being used only for matters that genuinely require their expertise;
• the power of “plain language drafting” to quicken understanding and the contracting process; and
• the building of cross-party deal rapport that sets the groundwork for successful long-term commercial relationships.

By contrast, using “any old” contract template to support a vital business processes is like building a house upon sand – you are using weak foundations which reinforce a diminished view of the value of IHLs.

Try GLS Legal Docs™ for Free – Create an NDA

The use of “business-enabling” contracting has the following impacts of IHL value recognition:

If, by any chance you are not convinced by this proposition, simply ask your internal client what kind of contract experience they would prefer...

The mirror reflects what is there

In many ways the quality of a legal template library reflects the value a business places on its IHL - just as heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight reflects one’s overall physical health.

IHLs should therefore ask themselves – are their templates:

• strategic “business enabling” assets - i.e. are they are part of a high IHL value recognition environment?
• a mish mash of ad hoc and variable quality documents – i.e. are they are part of a low IHL value recognition environment?

If your templates are not "business enabling" assets you are likely to also experience low IHL value recognition.  

After all, if your business does not value you, why would it give you the best tools?

Universal access to business-enabling legal templates

Whilst historically only the biggest, most generously funded IHL teams have had access to high quality template libraries – now anyone can access and afford this resource via The GLS Legal Template Solutions.

The GLS Legal Template Solutions are an online, fully curated and automated library of self-editing world-class legal templates that allow you to deliver contracting solutions for the most common business scenarios.

For as little as a few hundred dollars, The GLS Legal Template Solutions enable IHL teams of all sizes to pivot towards “business enabling” contracting and command greater IHL value recognition.

Now IHLs of all sizes can access legal templates that deliver a "business enabling" experience that in turn will drive IHL value recognition and page the way for greater IHL strategic contributions.

Ten foundational legal documents underpin the majority of the vital processes present in most businesses. At GLS, we call them the “Work Horses” and in far too many businesses they are not being cared for correctly. 

In a world defined by technology and innovation the attention of the in-house lawyer (the “IHL”) can easily stray towards the “next big thing” and away from their dutiful servants, the Work Horses.

Yet, the Work Horses account for, or underpin, much of the economic value of a business. When performing properly they facilitate stability, transparency and optimised business performance.

In this Blog we provide the IHL community with a timely recap of the strategic importance of the Work Horses – a message that should be passed on by IHLs to their businesses.

Indeed, one of our most disruptive IHL recommendations is to recognise that the Work Horses are the diet, exercise and sleep that drives the overall well-being of your business, and they are easy to optimise.

“Business-enabling” Work Horse templates are an essential inclusion for any legal template library and are the cornerstone of a highly-effective legal resource leverage strategy that allows IHLs to:

• maximise their impact on business fundamentals;
• create a platform for even greater strategic contributions to their business; and
• drive greater IHL value recognition.

The GLS Legal Operations Centre ™, holds our world-class online library of automated legal templates, can help you deploy a definitive Work Horse strategy that allows you to do the simple things exceptionally well.

Try our GLS Legal Docs for free -  create an NDA

Work horses & their strategic importance

Not everything IHLs do is new, exciting and glamorous – but the criticality of the role and the potential for greater strategic contributions frequently resides in its “business as usual” nature.

In the below infographic we have identified 5 irrefutably vital processes present in most business and identified the Work Horse agreements that enable or underpin those processes.

Whilst the Work Horses identified above might, at first blush, seem “garden variety”, this does not, for a second, diminish their potential strategic importance to a business.

As such, it is critical that IHLs remind themselves (and their businesses) of the importance of the support they provide via the Work Horse - if IHLs cannot appreciate it, no one else will.

In the remainder of this Blog we help IHLs identify some of the many ways that the Work Horses can make substantive and qualitative contributions to vital business processes.

Supply Chain Documents	Information Documents
Sales Agreement Services Agreement Purchase Orders	Website T&Cs Privacy Policies / Data Processor Non-Disclosure Agreement
When drafted well these: Recognise supply chain criticality Optimise supply chain performance Support vendor performance management Facilitate faster deal closure and renewal Place focus on vendor performance Reduce the need for procurement/legal support Reduce the need for external consultants Preserves management time Makes contracts that are easier to manage Improve vendor relations Enable “deal memory” Reduce incidence of disputes Encourage efficient dispute resolution Facilitate supply automation/workflows	When drafted well these: Enable critical information flows Make it easier for parties to deal with you Facilitate third-party commercial dealings Promote safer data collection practices Reduce GDPR type risk exposure Enhance a business’s reputation Enhance responsible data user status Protect your own valuable data Mitigate data usage risks Protect the monetary value of information Accommodate flexible business growth Facilitate data leverage growth Facilitate online trading Protect your online assets

IP/IT Documents	Human Resource Documents
IP Licenses IP Assignment	Employment Agreement
When drafted well these: Recognise the vital role of IP assets Protect key business IP assets Allow for IP asset register growth Drive up the valuation of your business Allow for IP asset monetisation Enable IP assets to be used as loan collateral Reduce the risk of third party IPR claims Allow for R&D to occur more efficiently Can reduce capital requirements	When drafted well this: Recognises criticality of human assets Makes it easier to attract top talent Creates positive first impressions Explains roles and responsibilities Locks in employee generated IPR Enables employee performance management Delivers performance incentives Recognises that employee disputes do arise Mitigates the risk of employee claims Smooths out bad hire departures Protects a business from reputational risk Protects against client/employee solicitation

Finance Documents

Loan Agreement

When drafted well this: Reflects that cash is a business’s runway Evidences availability of funding Reduces financing costs Ensures security packages are proportionate Ensures that operations are not inhibited by external parties Reduces compliance costs Provides lenders with sensible “default terms” Facilitates cash flow stability Facilitates low-risk business growth

Business-enabling legal contracting

Given the centrality of these Work Horses to your most vital business processes, it is critical to have them in a condition that maximises their strategic contribution to those processes  and drives IHL value recognition.

The potency of your Work Horses can and does materially impact the ability of your business to initiate, sustain and optimise the vital business processes that drive its overall performance.

“These contracts need to be well thought out and well drafted 

and can be crucial to the success of a business.” -  Forbes

However, for many businesses the condition of their Work Horse templates does not reflect their significance to the business. Indeed, many businesses have precedent libraries that:

• are a mess of ad hoc templates pulled together from various sources of varying quality;
• are legally sound but are impenetrable to "non-lawyers" and take far too long to agree with a counter-party;
• are stored in multiple and decentralised locations resulting in inconsistent use;
• are updated irregularly and fail to inspire user confidence; or
• do not reflect a consistent legal risk profile, usually reflecting the absence of an authoritative legal risk policy.

In contrast, using top quality Work Horses means facilitating a contracting experience that involves:

• documents that are easy to work with – i.e. quick to read, quick to be understood by “non-lawyers”, quick to agree, easy to amend, easy to review and easy to administer;
• documents that set the deal up for success by being absolutely clear on each party’s respective rights and obligations;
• documents that do not waste key-stakeholder time on “white noise” issues/negotiations;
• documents that mean that external consultants are used only for matters that genuinely require their expertise;
• documents that enable the building of the kind of cross-party deal rapport that sets the groundwork for successful long-term commercial relationship; and
• a clear and continued focus on desired outcomes – the “what are we trying to achieve”, and creates the conditions needed for those outcomes to emerge.

For as little as a few hundred dollars, GLS gives IHL teams, of all sizes, access to the kind of “business enabling” Work Horse templates that will drive greater IHL value recognition.

The GLS Legal Template Solutions provide an online, fully curated and automated library of self-editing world-class legal templates that deliver contracting solutions for most common business scenarios.

Indeed, for the cost of what you may have last spent on a lunch you may access, on an unlimited basis, all of the 70+ legal documents available via The GLS Legal Template Solutions.

Journalist Cat Rutter Pooley of the Financial Times wrote some incredibly kind words about GLS and our ongoing quest to innovate the legal industry. Her Special Report was released alongside the confirmation that GLS had been shortlisted as "The Most Innovative Law Firm in the Asia Pacific" and is reproduced below.

 GLS would like to extend its sincere appreciation to the Financial Times for its recognition and to Cat for her generous praise and kind words. Whilst GLS's primary motivation has always been, and remains, to make world-class legal services more accessible to businesses, it is obviously very gratifying to know that our efforts in this regard have been noticed and recognised.

Financial Times Special Report - Law firm Experiments in Getting Things Done

Cat Pooley’s Review of GLS Law Firm – Shortlisted as the Most Innovative Law Firm Asia Pacific 

While some leading firms have backed the growing law-tech scene, other developments in the region have been driven from outside the traditional law firm structure.  “Rejecting technology and efficiency is a logical step when you rely on the billable hour” says Matt Glynn, a former private practice lawyer who was spurred to found Global Legal Solutions (GLS), a tech-driven business based out of Singapore.

GLS offers its clients both legal advice and technological answers to legal problems. Firms have experimented with alternatives to charging by the hour, such as value-based billing or fixed-fee arrangements, but the time sheet remains at the heart of most private practice business models.

GLS’s law firm arm operates differently, however. It uses a technology platform to help its lawyers, most of whom completed their training (and at least 5 years PQ) at international firms, to answer what the company describes as the “80 per cent of legal problems all businesses have” for 20 per cent of the cost.

“We don’t do the publicly listed deals,” Mr Glynn says, “because most companies don’t. For “bet-the-farm” mergers and acquisitions deals, there is no one better than a Slaughters or a Linklaters . . . But they have no business going in and charging $600 an hour for reviewing an employment contract,” he adds.

The GLS Law Firm innovation is not simply a question of offering external legal professionals to clients as needed to help them cut in-house salary bills. GLS does that, but Mr Glynn says: “You can only do cheaper manpower once.”

It has instead also developed sets of templates, legal policies and negotiation playbooks, plus technology that can automate other common processes for clients, as well as offering add-on technology to help troubleshoot for in-house counsel once the initial work is done.

Moreover, it supports smaller businesses that lack the internal resources of global firms.

“We’re still trusted advisers. We’re just now free from time sheets, with a new platform and new working practices, and we are solving challenges,”

Mr Glynn

Visit the GLS Legal Operations Centre

What is a Services Agreement?

The Services Agreement is the “work horse” legal agreement of the global business community, facilitating millions of essential commercial service interactions each day, but all too frequently its true “business-enabling” potential is not realised.

Parties looking to provide services like to get paid, and parties receiving services only like to pay for services properly provided. Given such obviously aligned interests, Services Agreements should perform reliably – but all too often they don’t.

Most businesses feel that the Services Agreement contracting process takes too long to conclude, often involves too much legal expense and generally results in sub-optimal delivery, or in the worst-case scenario, litigation from contractual disputes.

In this article we share with you the basic insights that can allow you to better harness the business-enabling potential of the humble Services Agreement.

A “business-enabling” Services Agreement that can be agreed between parties with minimal time, cost and fuss can be accessed here.  Given how critical it is to the conduct of business, every business needs an efficient Services Agreement solution.

Create your custom Services Agreement by clicking HERE

The Role of the Services Agreement

The Services Agreement allows businesses to source essential services or skills which a business is unable, or less well placed, to provide for itself. Almost all businesses rely on another business for the provision of services at some point.

From a holistic viewpoint, the documentational universe of a service provision arrangement typically includes:

• the Services Agreement: the basic terms and conditions upon which the services will be provided and payment is made.
• the Purchase Order: an instrument under the Services Agreement allowing the customer to call for service provision under the Services Agreement or one which describes such services, and includes its own legal terms and conditions.
• the Service Level Agreement: either a standalone agreement or an instrument within the Services Agreement that articulates the specific service levels,     how they are measured and reported and what happens if they are not attained.
• the Master Services Agreement: an overarching agreement that governs the provision of a range of services on pre-agreed terms that can be available to a company or group of companies, frequently operating globally.

Depending on the level of sophistication of a business – a service provision arrangement might comprise some, or all, of the above. However, it all amounts to the same thing – a business needing services support and the service provider looking to be paid for that support.

Unquestionably, the Services Agreement, as one of the most essential forms of legal co-operation between businesses, is just as important to smaller businesses as it is to multi-national companies. All businesses need a robust Services Agreement solution.

The Benefits of a Services Agreement

The benefits of a “business-enabling” Services Agreement are as profound as they are simple – the parties get out of the agreement what they intended when they went into it.

Both parties benefit from a well-defined Services Agreement. The Services Agreement keeps the relationship within the agreed parameters and if properly constructed, motivates and incentivises an accountable form of delivery that keeps the parties aligned.

“Without question, every business needs a robust Services Agreement in order to drive effective, productive and efficient business engagement."

If businesses can implement more effective service provision arrangements (i.e. outcomes achieved) in a more efficient manner, the net contribution to the overall level of business activity of each party, and the global economy, would grow exponentially.

So given the evident benefits of a “business-enabling” Service Agreement, why then does this all too frequently prove elusive? The answer is that parties all too often are placing negotiation effort in the wrong areas.

Why do Services Agreements fail to perform as they should?

The irrefutable reality is that most Services Agreements do not fail to deliver a lack of clever words included in the contract by lawyers. The root cause of failure is far more basic than this.

Most Services Agreements fail to perform as hoped because the parties fail to reach a clear and mutual understanding on the following essential matters:

• What is to be provided and by whom?
• How is it to be provided and by when?
• How proper service delivery will be recognised?
• What happens if the services are not properly provided?
• How much does it cost and when is payment required?

Whilst painting with a broad brush, there are three key factors why both parties' attention are not focussed enough on the above “essentials”:

The Rush: all too often parties think a deal must be signed “now” at the expense of clearly articulating the above essentials. A “business-enabling” deal will only ever emerge when alignment on essential points emerges – so take your time.

The Leverage: Service Agreements are mostly produced by the service provider, who would typically leverage your needs for a prompt solution to their advantage by insisting on asymmetric legal risk terms.

The Lawyers: lawyers tend to direct the focus on what happens if things go wrong and not on what it will take for success to occur. Planning for risk eventuality is not wrong – but it cannot crowd out the opportunity to encourage successful performance.

Getting what you need from a Services Agreement means reviewing the Services Agreement to ensure that it deals with the essentials whilst securing sensible legal risk allocation in a time frame that keeps up the vital deal momentum.

How can you achieve a “Business-Enabling” Services Agreement?

With the Services Agreement being one of the absolute fundamentals of a strong business, including a “business-enabling” Services Agreement template in your arsenal of corporate assets is essential. Fortunately, getting it right is not as difficult as you might think.

Given that a Services Agreement is concluded hundreds of thousands of times per day, there really isn’t any magic in how to conclude a good one. However, for the reasons described above – optimal service-based contracting frequently eludes the parties. 

What if there was a different way? What if all the essential pre-sets for a “business-enabling” contract - good industry practice, acceptable industry risk allocation - were already dialled in so that parties can focus on the basics?

“What if you could adopt or start with a Services Agreement template that allowed the parties to focus their energies on the essentials of service delivery?”

The Global Legal Solutions automated Services Agreement delivers precisely this - and in minutes. By following an online interview, a world class Services Agreement can be produced for you in minutes and allow you to be focussed on the essentials.

If focus is not placed in the right areas, the opportunity to conclude business is itself in jeopardy. The inability to conclude a contract quickly can result in the opportunity going cold.

A Services Agreement from a traditional law firm can cost thousands of dollars, and in many cases, tens of thousands of dollars, and when customisation may be required with each piece of new business, that too can result in significant annual expenditure.
 

A traditional law firm may charge you thousands of dollars and take days or weeks to turn around a Services Agreement.  The Global Legal Solutions platform takes minutes and only costs USD $799 and includes a 30 minute expert consultation.

To build your own Services Agreement, dialled in to all the things that matter, allowing you to tailor the agreement to your country of operation and business needs, click here to begin.

Few would argue that costs are a huge barrier to accessing external legal support. However, those with budgets point to a more practical obstacle, namely the ‘time cost’ of engagement.

Many In-House counsel share the common challenge of it simply taking too long to agree on scopes of work, obtain reliable quote(s), and therefore being unable to engage external support in real time.

If it takes too long to engage external support then accessing their capacity and expertise ceases to represent a viable resourcing strategy - placing further pressure on the In-House team.

Accordingly, an In-House external counsel management strategy that not only manages external provider costs but ensures that external providers are mobilised rapidly is in and of itself a valuable resource.

In this piece, we identify the legacy challenges associated with engaging external providers and outline strategies to help make that process more efficient, including using GLS Quick Quotes™.

Try GLS Quick Quotes™ - a fully costed legal proposal in 30 minutes.

The Challenge for legal counsel

In most cases need for external support arises on short notice and the support is needed in a hurry. Almost every brief requiring external support is time-sensitive.

Yet the process of engaging external support invariably involves a process that is itself time intensive and tends to look like this:

• Preparing a scope of work
• Identifying appropriate providers
• Sending briefs
• Clearing conflicts
• Responding to clarifications
• Waiting for finalised proposals
• Comparing different proposals
• Raising your own queries
• Receiving clarifications
• Reviewing updated proposals
• Appointing provider
• Finalising the engagement
• Project/matter kick-off

The 'time cost' In-House teams incur working through the above steps can be significant and increases exponentially in the case of international transactions and new market work.

Ironically, the pressure that In-House legal counsel face to reduce external costs by sourcing through a multi-provider strategy (e.g. usually 2-3 quotes) results in increased ‘time costs’ for each engagement.

What In-House counsel get back

Ask any In-House lawyer and they will express amazement at how different, and at times, incomparable, the responses from different providers can be to the same request for services.

Making an “apples to apples” comparison of service provider proposals is not always possible, particularly where different pricing and project assumptions are used.

 

Whilst the notion of a “panel” would alleviate some of the above difficulties, very few businesses operate a panel given the restraints it places on sourcing competitively.

All too often the In-House team elects not to engage external support and assumes the workload itself – adding further to its resource crunch and potentially denying it the expertise it might require.

 

 

Tips for driving efficiencies

Whilst much of the above process engagement process is inevitable, there are things that the In-House team can do to expedite many parts of the process, including the following:

• Initiate Early: raise your request for support as early as you can
• Scope: get this as precise as possible to reduce the potential for clarifications
• Assumptions: define the assumptions providers can use regarding the scope of work
• Deliverables: clearly state the deliverables that you wish to receive
• Pricing: insist that all providers use common pricing assumptions that you provide
• Clarifications: aggregate and communicate all queries to providers at the same time
• Format: dictate the format for response to allow for a straight-line comparison
• Minimalism: don’t ask for things you don’t need – you will need to review it
• Template: develop your own standard template for requesting proposals

It is paramount that the required scope of work be defined correctly as if you do not know what you are asking for, how will you know when you receive it.

Another way for In-House teams

In-House teams need to focus on the precision of their requests and demand disciplined responses from their external providers in order to make qualitative and efficient appointments.

Additionally, GLS has totally disrupted the time it takes for any business to receive a fully transparent, fixed price legal support proposal via GLS Quick Quotes™ - our online quotation system.

GLS Quick Quotes™ delivers to you:

• a fixed price quotation for your specific transaction
• complete transparency around scope of work, deliverables, assumptions and pricing
• a proposal typically delivered within 30 minutes (where all information is provided)
• an opportunity to see what world class legal support looks like at a disruptive price point

For any common legal needs that most businesses might encounter, GLS is able to provide a fully costed support proposal that observes the above principles in around 30 minutes.

FIXED PRICE QUOTES IN 30MIN

Legal Service Providers are a resource category that must be performance managed to achieve as much for you as possible – See GLS External Counsel Management™.

The vocational journey of the In-House lawyer has long since ceased to be an attractive safe-harbour from the performance pressures of private practice – it is now as challenging and often more so.

In-House teams all over the world face unrelenting pressure to achieve “far more with far less” for the businesses they serve, and to be able to positively demonstrate that they are doing so.

In the new era of empirical performance data, unlike private practice lawyers who can point to “billings”, In-House teams need to define and track the value they represent to their businesses.

In-House teams need a viable strategy to transform from Old to New Law operating conditions. For most, this journey will be about survival, but for the enlightened, it represents an incredible opportunity to shine.

Whilst a seemingly daunting task given the white noise and politics of the larger corporates that host most of the In-House community, taking simple effective steps often is all that is needed.

Here, we introduce GLS’s RPLV decision-making framework to help guide your In-House team’s journey from Old Law to New Law, where so much more is possible with so much less.

RPLV decision making is the basis upon which we develop all of our legal resource productivity solutions – all of which can be found at the GLS Legal Operations Centre. 

The Current Challenge - Much More Achieved with Much Less

Featured Resources:

Free: register for the Trial Plan with automated best practice templates

Free: GLS Contracting Infrastructure Health Audit Tool

Much has been written about the challenges faced by In-House teams. As the audience reading this piece live the experience every day, there is no need to cover things in-depth here.

Suffice it to say, In-House teams are required to service an exponentially increasing legal support and compliance workload with the same or fewer resources. This is now the new “norm’ and the pressure is on.

Using humour to make the point – today’s In-House job advert might look something like this: 

• Our CFO does not like cost items
• You do not make us a profit
• We don’t like spending money on lawyers
• We only use law firms when we have to
• You must ensure we face no problems
• Limited support/resources to be provided
• Private practice hours guaranteed but less money
• If you succeed, then explain why you are needed
• Replacing you with AI/Automation is likely
• Don’t plan your weekends
• Limited tools and training provided

Even if law firms could cut their fees by 50% (which they cannot), their “time for money” model has proven them consistently to be unreliable partners for In-House teams seeking to bridge their chronic resourcing deficit.

The future of the In-House team depends entirely on its own ability to do far more for itself, and with far less. It is up to the In-House team itself to re-define, re-task, re-skill and re-engineer what it can achieve for itself.

Indeed the job advertisements for the New Law In-House teams going forward will increasingly accentuate the New Law skill sets set out below.

The Required Transformation Journey for In-House Legal Teams

Featured Resources:

Free: GLS Contracting Infrastructure Health Audit Tool

The In-House community knows all too well that they need to be able to achieve more for themselves.

Almost every business we meet feels that their legal department tends to look like this… 

In the New Law era, the In-House team must look more like this …

 

How quickly an In-House team starts this transformation journey, and how the process is managed, will directly determine what kind of future that team will enjoy in the New Law Era.

The key features of the In-House transformation journey are as follows:

• Reversing the polarity of the legal resourcing deficit
• Handling day-to-day legal grind with less time and effort
• Spending more time helping the business make money
• Being better able to support “high profile” X-factor projects
• Demanding “enduring” value from all external service providers
• Delivering a more sustainable and satisfying In-House vocational experience
• Transformation is about small and effective steps taken frequently – there is no Big Bang!

So how can this be achieved in view of the seemingly insurmountable financial, cultural, resource-based restrictions facing most In-House teams, particularly in a large MNC?

RPLV - An Essential Decision-Making Framework for a New Law transformation

Featured Resources:

Free: watch the masterclass "In-House Challenges and the RPLV Response"

In-House teams need a simple, effective and easy-to-implement strategy over which they can exert maximum control to guide their journey from the Old Law to the New Law.

Accordingly, GLS strongly recommends In-House teams adopt its entirely non-invasive and free RPLV decision-making framework as a means of driving maximum legal resource expression.

The Constituent Ingredients of RPLV are:

Resources: Cognisance of all available legal resources and a plan to optimise them

Prioritisation: Decisions made by reference to an approved domain of responsibility

Leverage: Active consideration of legal resource leverage profile as part of decision-making

Validation: Active consideration of the ability to validate associated resource performance outcomes

RPLV places In-House team decision-making into a strategic transformation framework which allows for small and effective resource optimisation steps to be identified, and missteps to be avoided.

Moreover, a steady, incremental approach based on small successful steps led by the In-House team is the ONLY pathway for a successful New Law transformation as:

• In-House teams are actually best placed to “author” their own transformation plan
• change should come from within as most categories of legal resources are actually under-utilised
• foundational transformation can already be achieved with little to no expenditure
• the In-House team must deliver results that the rest of the business will want to support

Incidentally, RPLV is the same methodology that underpins the market-leading “legal resource productivity" solutions accessible via the GLS Legal Operations Centre.

In the balance of this piece we will explain how RPLV works, along with how easy it is to implement RPLV decision-making.

In-House Legal Resources

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GLS Legal Department Efficiency Audit

The inviolable principle of a New Law transformation is that each and every class of legal resource deployed by a business must achieve optimal productivity expression.

Sadly, too many businesses view their legal resources in limited terms such as "headcount” and “external” budget – and in so doing deprive themselves of the ability to optimise.

Such an approach is like a professional sprinter training solely by running fast and disregarding core strength, explosiveness, visualisation, flexibility, CO2 capacity, recovery, sleep, diet, routine, etc.

Accordingly, the essential pre-cursor to a successful New Law transformation journey is to identify the true scope and nature of legal resources available to the legal team.

GLS advocates that the In-House team must consider their legal resources using the below types of resource categorisation, each of which can be optimised and uniquely combined for optimal effect.

With this enhanced view of the available legal resources, the ability to make strategic resourcing adjustments that deliver multiplier performance outcomes is greatly enhanced.

Effective Prioritisation and Legal Policy Assets

Featured Resources:

GLS Contracting Policy™ - the foundation of an efficient legal function

GLS Legal Dept Service Charter™ - define service levels and standards for your legal function

No In-House team has the resources to do everything that it needs to do so teams must focus on what will “move the needle” for its business and manage its finite legal resources accordingly.

If a legal team lacks clear policy assets defining the legal & compliance requirements for each area of legal domain responsibility, correct prioritisation of finite legal resources cannot occur.

Sadly, most legal teams do not benefit from a clear board-approved operational mandate, known to the business, which contextualises resourcing decisions and against which performance is judged.

You can see GLS’s view of the legal domain responsibility that ought to be covered by Group Legal Policy assets by clicking here- it will serve as useful comparison as to the state of your own legal policy assets.

Clearly articulated Group Legal Policy assets, such as GLS Group Legal Policy™ are essential to the implementation of New Law transformations, and can be implemented as part of the transformation journey.

However, if such policy assets are not in place, then not only is effective New Law transformation prevented, an In-House team may find itself afflicted by the following “handicap” conditions:

• a reactive footing – the team finds itself reacting to the business instead of actively pursuing established priorities in a manner that permits optimised resourcing
   
• compromised capacity – the capacity, status and reporting lines are not easily understood by the business resulting in diluted effectiveness and diluted ability to influence the business
   
• inability to performance manage – a lack of clear objectives and responsibility deprives the team the ability to performance manage and track progress against goal realisation
   
• inability to access resource – making the case for essential resources cannot be articulated by reference to business-approved objectives

The Group Legal Policy assets most essential for transformation are those that focus on the Online legal documents“80% of the time” needs of the business (the “80% Requirement”).

GLS offers a range of pre-prepared legal department policy assets that can quickly become specific to your business, paving the way for each area of your New Law transformation.

Leveraging Legal Resources

Featured Resources:

Free: How to Avoid a High-Tech Train-Wreck

Once your true inventory of available legal resources available is understood, choices can be made as to how to achieve optimal productivity resonance for each class of legal resource across the business.

Leverage profiling involves assessing the extent to which the deployment of a class of legal resource can achieve maximum ongoing and sustainable resonance across your organisation.

As a simple example, commissioning the creation of a new legal template that your business will use all the time offers better ROI than a template for a one-off non-critical deal type.

It is noteworthy that the highest levels of legal resource resonance can frequently be achieved from legal resource classes that are needed to meet the 80% Requirement.

The leverage assessment includes looking at efficiencies that can be built into each class of legal resource itself and/or what can be achieved by that category of legal resource and typical questions include:

• how frequently does the underlying legal support requirement arise?
• how can the resource deployment benefit the business most?
• what resource deployments create the loudest organisation resonance?
• how can the resource deployment be re-utilised by the business?
• is there a productivity multiplier effect that can be achieved?
• will the resource deployment result in a knowledge harvest opportunity?
• does the legal resource category offer standardisation potential?
• can automation of the resource category/workflow be achieved?
• what is the extent to which the deployment will resonate across the wider company/group?

In view of the above, it is easy to see why policy-based legal assets offer the highest organisational resonance and are essential for any New Law transformation.

The General Counsel that does not consider the leverage profile of each class of their legal resource, especially for the 80% Requirement, is likely passing up on utilising significant levels of untapped capacity.

The GLS Legal Operations Centre In-House channel comprises numerous solutions to help maximise what most classes of legal resources can achieve.

The Empirical Data Era

Featured Resources:

Free: GLS Contracting Infrastructure Health Audit Tool

GLS Legal Dept. KPI Manual™ - legal department KPI’s developed by leading in-house lawyers

The New Law team must be able to demonstrate the value contribution it makes to the business in order to survive and particularly if it wants to support/funding for additional New Law initiatives.

Increasingly, the notion that the intangible nature of the In-House role, driven by its non-P&L construct, renders it immune from performance management, is being rejected.

Accordingly, the extent to which you can track the productivity outcomes achieved by a particular class of legal resource is becoming an increasingly important factor in decision-making.

New Law legal teams will increasingly operate in what we are calling the “empirical data era” where they adopt and monitor performance metrics such as those set out below.

Rich performance data will allow New Law legal teams to increasingly improve the quality of its decision-making and the productivity returns it can achieve from all classes of its legal resources.

To deny the inevitability of the “empirical data” era is a little like thinking that a mobile phone that can take pictures will not catch on. Legal teams must avoid their Kodak moment.

The Future

Featured Resources:

Free: Book an efficiency consultation with a GLS Expert

Free: visit the GLS Legal Operations Centre

In-House legal teams are in the preventative health business which takes enlightened thinking and discipline to embrace and accounts for the low value recognition placed on our performance.

In-House teams must now also deliver far more “business-enabling” support to its business – it must contribute far more to the revenue and strategy-based projects of the underlying business.

This must be achieved as overall In-House workload continues to rise. New Law In-House teams need surgical focus, sharp prioritisation, the ability to leverage, and the ability to validate.

Those in the profession that do not adapt to the new operating conditions will fall out of the profession as it no longer offers a reprieve from the performance pressures of private practice.

Those who “act now” will find the move from the Old Law to the New Law ways of doing things to be less painful and will get to author their own transformation journey.

GLS’s RPLV offers a non-invasive strategic decision-making framework that can drive that journey and it is entirely free – we encourage and dare you to try it.

The GLS Legal Operations Centre, the World’s No 1 legal operations centre, is based on RPLV thinking and is there to support you as you seek to deliver far more to your business with far less.

The recent proliferation of legal technology ("Legal Tech") related headlines suggests massive change is upon the legal industry – but what exactly is it and who will benefit from it?

The legal industry is engaged in lively debate about the role of Legal Tech but for many it is not clear whether we are witnessing the harbingers of hope or the end of the profession?

With more than 97% of businesses unable to get the legal support they need, and law firms ironically pleading famine, will Legal Tech correct this irrational market schism?

For the GLS Group, the World’s leading legal industry disruptor, we have used technology to remove 80%+ of the costs of legal advice and to provide businesses with powerful self-help tools.

However, we see first-hand that the technology behind the “attention grabbing” headlines remains inaccessible to most businesses due to cost, complexity and actual relevance.

Is this Legal Tech merely an investment fad … or is there a risk that is not being understood… which in both cases means it may just pass us by?

Many players in the legal industry remain uncertain as to what their relationship with Legal Tech ought to look like – is it friend or foe – and how will I know?

THE OUTLINE

In this article, we seek to share critical observations and lessons, derived from our amazing journey, to help businesses make smart and informed Legal Tech choices.

Specifically, we share our unique perspective on:

• what to make of the current Legal Tech hysteria;
• how to engage with Legal Tech such that it becomes accessible; to you;
• the GLS view of the true role of Legal Tech;
• the risks of premature deployment of high Tech over low Tech;
• a dependable engagement strategy as you seek to leverage Legal Tech; and
• the supposed existential threat posed to our profession by Legal Tech.

Finally, we will invite you to experience GLS’s range of technology-enabled solutions that demonstrate how Legal Tech can power productivity at an inconsequential expense.  

SIFTING THROUGH THE HUBRIS

In 2018 a reported US$ 1B+ was raised in the name of Legal Tech projects, with the greatest level of investment being in respect of artificial intelligence.

This US$1B+ was spent across 40 legal technology deals, compared to $233 million across 61 deals in 2017.

Of that $1B, a reported $362 million went on attention-grabbing legal solutions utilising artificial intelligence ("AI") including:

• Kira Systems: a machine learning software that searches and analyses contracts and related documents
• TurboPatent: a programme that tracks ideas and determine where they are in the patents process
• Gavelytics: a programme that seek to assess your chances in front of a particular judge

Interestingly, AI based spending in 2018 was reported to have exceeded total Legal Techspending in 2017.

We refer to these AI based varietals of Legal Tech as “Ultra-High-Legal Tech”.

With such levels of investment going into new Legal Tech developments, particularly Ultra-High-Legal Tech, it begs several obvious questions including:

• when can the wider legal industry (and businesses generally – particularly those that cannot access legal support) expect to start to feel its benefits?
• is this just another “dot.com, bitcoin, Dutch-tulip type phenomenon?

What we are seeing as a leading legal industry disruptor force with a huge roster of both large MNCs and small clients is as follows:

• very few clients have had any type of exposure to the benefits of Ultra-High-Legal Tech; and
• of those that have tried Ultra-High-Legal Tech, they have overwhelmingly not felt the “game changing” effects that were promised (more on this later).

‘’GLS believes that the plethora of ’High Legal Tech' headlines is about as relevant to most lawyers as news of Sir Richard Branson's space tourism to the average traveller - nice to know but they won't be buying a ticket''

The GLS reality proven every day is that game changing Legal Tech is abundant, available and accessible to those that are capable of recognising it – but only if it’s used properly.

RECOGNISING EFFECTIVE LEGAL TECHNOLOGY

The volume of Ultra-High-Legal-Tech press coverage has left many players feeling insecure – as though their inability to access such technology jeopardises their future.

Such narrowband associations obscure the availability and accessibility of transformative Legal Tech that can revolutionise the practice of law for law firms and in-house teams.

GLS’s unquestioned success is based around a far more robust and accessible definition “technology” as follows:

‘Technology is anything that increases the unit of productivity achieved per unit of effort'

When viewed from this perspective, the seemingly limitless potential for technology to be applied to legal support scenarios opens up and becomes imminently accessible to all.

We believe our view of Legal Tech allows businesses and in-house teams to experience their “Neo moment” and to see that the enabling Legal Tech matrix is both all around and accessible.

For our own extensive R&D efforts, this means that contract automation and AI are examples of technology, but they fit into a wider spectrum of options.

To organise and best utilise these options we categorise technologies by references to the legal activities/processes that they support.

The above technology categories, whilst not exhaustive, are distinct in that that they all target specific aspects of legal practice where GLS is seeking to create efficiencies.

Our point is that “technology” is pervasive and focuses on achieving efficiencies everywhere – not just in a few specific instances that happen to be grabbing the headlines.

AN EFFECTIVE APPROACH TO LEGAL TECHNOLOGY

Technology can profoundly impact the day-to-day work of lawyers and significantly improve the contribution they make to business (whether in private practice or in-house).

Technology applied correctly will resonate in time, cost and quality efficiencies across the spectrum of legal practice, examples of which include:

• allowing lawyers to focus on strategic “business enabling” advice
• recognising that a workflow that can be automated is no longer lawyering
• accelerated acquisition of functional expertise
• massive reductions in costs
• easier implementation and monitoring of group-wide legal and compliance positions
• reducing instances of human error, e.g. typos
• making processes more reliable/predictable
• ensuring secure, organisation-wide access to key documents
• far greater intra and inter organisation collaboration
• speeding up deal completion
• reducing the time required to upskill new members of the legal team
• increasing the transparency on matters
• making empirical analysis of contract performance possible
• embedding the “safeguarding” of legal policy within the wider organisation
• making work flows more interesting

With this in mind a totally new “legal technology paradigm” emerges:

• effective Legal Tech must be both conceptually and cost accessible
• powerful forms of Legal Tech can be recognised almost everywhere
• the most potent and accessible forms of Legal Tech are the most cost effective
• all legal functional (private practice/in-house) can actively leverage Legal Tech
• implementing basic technologies will lead to guaranteed productivity improvements
• basic technologies should form the platform from which advanced technologies can operate
• Legal Tech can enhance the advisory capabilities of every lawyer

In the time-based architecture of Traditional Law, technologies that reduce task-time has been viewed as economically irrational, which explains the glacial rate of adoption.  

'Whilst it is not surprising that Traditional Law Firms effectively choose to ignore the abundance of available technology, for an in-house team to do so would be to ignore the veritable gift horse'

A few observations that might account for the subdued uptake of Legal Tech enabled offerings outside of the US includes:

• US based investment: most of investment is occurring in the US for the US market – which is quite reasonable given that the US is the “Big Banana” of the legal market
• Investors: VCs money is active, and demands high returns and quick exits – often delivered by the “hype driven updraft effect” of the “next big thing” –ie Ultra-High-Legal Tech
• US product centricity:  US legal style, whether its large block paragraphs or the acute litigious context, is shaping AI based logic away from applications in non-US markets
• Limited client focus: most high Tech offerings target the same actors prevalent in the Traditional Law model – law firms and large corporate law departments
• Authorship: the creators of many solutions are like “cobblers” offering custom shoes for a client they’ve never met – they may make great shoes, but do they really fit?

Even here in Singapore, our Global Headquarters, which has been widely praised as a technology-enabled hub, the uptake of Legal Tech has been slow.

Indeed, the Chief Justice of Singapore recently remarked that “[Singapore’s] response to legal technology has been lukewarm”

We conclude that the hubris of Ultra-High-Legal Tech headlines is in fact obscuring the immediately accessible potential of Legal Tech generally.

HIGH TECH IMPLEMENTATION - NOT FOR DAY 1

Before introducing a framework for effective formulation of a holistic Legal Tech agenda, we need to sound some loud notes of.

To pick up on a point raised above – most Ultra-High-Legal Tech implementations that GLS has encountered have been resounding failures.

We define, as everyone should, a failed implementation as one that “severely under-delivers on its promise” – and more than 90% of Ultra-High-Legal Tech implementations fall into this category.

The basis for Ultra-High-Legal Tech implementation failures amongst MNCs remains consistent in our experience and includes:

• it being a knee jerk procurement reaction to constant pressure for cost reductions;
• the tendency for “biggest must be best” procurement leads to Ultra-High-Legal Tech;
• lack of coordination between a diverse and active stakeholder constituency (legal, compliance, IT, finance, procurement, etc);
• solutions are being oversold by overzealous sales persons;
• failing to recognise that legal systems must work with organisation wide systems and not the other way around;
• a lack of policy framework and derivative collateral to drive desired system outcomes;
• system complexity far exceeding user competencies; and
• low Tech not being done well, so the high Tech is not enabled.

The last point is absolutely critical – almost every MNC we have encountered has not been ready for an Ultra-High-Legal Tech implementations – and this includes FTSE 100 level MNCs.

If you think about it, if each organisation started off by doing the low-legal Tech well then each cause of failure would have been mitigated by default.

For example, automating an entire contracting cycle is quite simply a fool’s errand unless a substantial amount of low/potent technology preparation has already been done.  

We have seen dozens of “whole life” contract management system implementations simply fail as they went ahead without:

• an agreed legal policy for organisation wide contracting parameters;
• standardised and approved clause banks and legal templates;
• defined contract approval flows;
• negotiation playbooks defined by reference to an authorised legal policy;
• solutions defined by references to official delegations of authority; and
• defined  risk and compliance overlays for the Legal Tech solution.

For a business to address any of the above would in fact be a potent low Legal Tech solution.

Moreover, such low Legal Tech solutions are within reach of every business (see www.gls-legaloperations.com example).

Once these are embedded within a business, implementing High Tech solutions becomes both easy and effective.

Whether it's SAP, ARIBA or BRAVO system, if you haven’t done the Low Tech prep work then what might end up being delivered is merely a hugely expensive Dropbox.  

The GLS conclusion is simple – you have no business going near a high Tech implementation unless you have first done your Low Tech right.

POTENT LOW TECH FIRST – PLEASE!

So rushing headlong into a High Tech implementation carries a high likelihood of an expensive failure.

Beyond that though, why should even Low Tech be implemented?

Well, the case is overwhelming:

• it as economically rational as it is affordable as it is powerful
• it’s what will let you achieve what your business is demanding – achieve far more with far less;
• it is readily available and easily affordable;
• the attendant risks are negligible;
• it allows for bespoke and “spot application” implementation;
• successful implementation allows you to make the case for high Tech; and
• you can implement it yourself.

That is why the GLS Group does offer "Ultra-High-Legal Tech" (eg. AI and contract automation), but we also offer an extensive number of genuine "Low-Legal-Tech" support solutions.

As examples of phenomenal Legal Tech that have transformed clients from the largest MNCs to the smallest Start-Ups:

GLS Group Legal Policy™ | GLS Clause Bank™ | GLS Playbook™ | GLS 3rd Party Paper Checklist™

IS THIS WHAT THE COOL KIDS CALL “DISRUPTION”?

Too many analysts talk of Legal Tech in terms of a market place that is comprised only of law firms and major legal corporate departments.

In many respects they are correct as much investment has been in the Ultra-High-Legal Tech domain that aims at big ticket end customers.  

For GLS a genuinely disruptive Legal Tech is not something that can only available to the largest corporate departments.

Truly disruptive Legal Tech is technology that makes legal support, in its widest sense, more accessible to and drives productivity and profitability in, all businesses.

We firmly believe that a truly disruptive Legal Tech will allow anyone anywhere who can get an internet connection to be able to access the same world-class advice.

As a result, the technology enabled solutions we deploy deliver a price point accessible to almost every SME globally, and yet are also regularly consumed by major MNCs.

Technology that only benefits the top 3% of businesses is not a truly game changing technology  - and yet these are the technologies that are grabbing the headlines.

‘’Few industries experience the pressure to do more with less as acutely as the law industry is currently facing - and about time too (but that is a topic for another day).

whilst the temptation is to effect a knee jerk reaction/ hunt for a silver bullet solution - the consequences of a failed legal implementation can lead to further inefficiencies and general tech wariness''

THE GLS FRAMEWORK FOR LEGAL TECH ENGAGEMENT

In summary, the way to achieve the greatest productivity outcomes, with the lowest costs and is to implement Legal Tech in the following steps:

• Identify your Legal Priorities: this is essential if you are to make the best decisions about how to apply your “finite” legal resources. (See GLS Group Legal Policy™ )
• MIMO: Identify your most problematic performance areas and consider which will respond the most to a low Legal Tech solution (e.g. third party contracting)
• Low Tech First: Consider all available low Legal Tech solutions - focus on a low Legal Tech with organisational resonance that is also the easiest one to implement
• Engage users: You must ensure that all stake-holders and end users understand how the solutions will benefit them – get them to buy into your problem-solving efforts
• Slowly: Proceed with a limited implementation focused on your most pressing legal policy areas identified through the above considerations – keep it humble
• Prove it: It is essential that you collect empirical data about the productivity gains achieved by your initiative to pave the way for bigger and better things.
• Keep proving it: Monitor your empirical data for at least 6-12 months
• Rinse and Repeat: Proceed cautiously with any desired higher Tech implementations but based of the learning from each previous implementation.

The biggest barrier to using Legal Tech services is obviously its successful adoption by your business – following the above strategy will ensure that successful adoption occurs in the vast majority of the time.

ABOUT GLS GROUP

The GLS Group is the world’s leading legal industry disruptor and comprises an internationally licensed law firm – GLS Law Firm, and its alternative legal solutions business – GLS Solutions. Founded in 2014 by a core team of highly recognised market leaders from top-tier global law firms (together with some of their clients), GLS Group exists because the businesses globally simply cannot afford the legal support it requires. The GLS Group, which now has over 200 staff globally, was recently shortlisted by the Financial Times as the Most Innovative Law Firm Asia Pacific – New Business and Service Delivery Model.

Visit The GLS Legal Operations Centre for all the resources, tools and transformation plans.

Contracts are the essential record of what parties agree and yet most end up signed, filed and forgotten - and usually reflect a painful, tedious and expensive contracting process.

On the other hand, the contracting process that starts with a really well written contract can deliver real 'business enabling' benefits to the parties including:

• significantly reducing the time required to complete a deal
• making a massive contribution to realising the commercial goals of the deal
• reducing the risks of dispute and their costs should they occur
• serving as a vital repository of important corporate memory

GLS has launched Legal Templates so that businesses can achieve the kind of efficient contracting process that genuinely helps businesses to get transactions done better, faster, safer and cheaper.

GLS Legal Docs™ is another demonstration by the GLS Group of how combining technology and legal content can eliminate the barriers that deny businesses access to world class legal support.

In this article we will introduce Legal Templates and examine:

• what defines the hallmarks of a “good contract"
• the true cost you face from using low quality agreements
• how contracts drive “business enablement”
• how traditional firms must re-think how they charge for their templates

We would also like to invite you to try Legal Templates for free - with a single click - and experience document automation in 4 languages.

WHAT IS THIS AND HOW DOES IT WORK? 

GLS delivers access to an online, curated and automated library of 70+ world class legal documents that address the most common commercial transactions faced by businesses globally.

This is not just a traditional precedent library - this is an automated library of precedents that will draft, edit and amend themselves into the contract/policy document/legal document that reflects your preferences!

Legal Templates allows any business anywhere to generate a world class legal document at a fraction of the cost that a traditional law firm would charge for the same.

Legal Templates operates on proprietary contracting automation software, into which the GLS Group has invested millions of dollars of contracting IP and decades of “best practice” knowledge.

Our technology works by guiding users through a short online interview that extracts the user’s legal preferences and commercial objectives.

These preferences and objectives/data points are then used to automatically generate a world class first draft of the desired agreement.

Each document in the Legal Templates library has been engineered with a total commitment to “contracting process efficiency” by experts with decades of experience at the world’s best law firms.

Legal Templates isn’t just about rapid first drafts – it’s about producing quality documents that drive the realisation of time, cost and quality efficiencies throughout the contracting process and project.

Each Legal Template also comes with a 30-minute consultation with a world class legal advisor whose sole remit is to ensure that the user’s goals for the document and/or project are realised.

Available 24/7/365, each document in GLS Legal Docs™ is constantly updated to keep in line with GLS’ own “best practice standard” at a price point that is a fraction of what would be charged by a traditional law firm.  

A 'BUSINESS ENABLING' CONTRACTING PROCESS - WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?

Top quality first drafts of legal documents contribute to a “business enabling” contracting process that allows a business to experience the following:

• a clear and continued focus on desired outcomes – the “what are we trying to achieve”
• documents that are easy to work with – that can be understood, amended, reviewed and administered with ease
• documents that set the deal up for success by being absolutely clear on each party’s respective rights and obligations
• key-stakeholder time not being diluted by “white noise” issues/negotiations
• external consultants being used only for matters that genuinely require their expertise
• the power of “plain language drafting” to quicken understanding and the contracting process
• the building of a cross-party deal rapport that sets the groundwork for a successful long-term commercial relationship

THE PROBLEMS SOLVED BY OUR LEGAL TEMPLATE OFFERING

Poor quality legal documents create significant time, cost and quality inefficiencies. Indeed, bad first drafts are notoriously hard to recover from.

The spill-over consequences of poor quality first-drafts are often greater than what most people will ever imagine, and include:

• damaged goodwill and potential mistrust between parties, as a result of drafts that do not reflect the sought-after commercial position (i.e - are they reneging factor)
• costs incurred as a result of negotiating-in requirements that have been overlooked (typically this is even harder than negotiating out errors)
• time wasted by both parties as a result of negotiating-out the numerous “weeds” present in poorly drafted clauses
• the projection of an image of sub-optimal professionalism by the authoring party, which can impact bargaining position and credibility
• time wasted in reviewing and negotiating non-controversial sections of a poor draft – at least 85% of any agreement should not be controversial
• payments to lawyers to review poor drafts – these payments are genuinely expensive as lawyers/in-house teams need to spend more time to review poor drafts
• even more payments to lawyers and time wasted by senior management, in order resolve disputes resulting from ambiguous wordings and contradictions

Beyond all of the above, poor drafts may often end-up becoming entirely redundant as their densely packed legalese typically ends up simply not being read by anyone in the business beyond the legal team.

Put simply, if you do not start with a top quality first draft then you are denying your project a 'business enabling' contracting experience.

For the in-house lawyer, the following could hinder the production of a high-quality first draft:

• the time it takes to instruct external counsel being as significant as the cost
• a lack of in-house precedents, or in-house precedent libraries that are sparse, poorly maintained and not automated
• internal users reusing the “last deal’s precedents” with the result that errors and irrelevant provisions get replicated
• the inefficiencies of trying to “tweak” the last “similar” deal takes on a life of its own compared to directly addressing the unique needs of the current deal and achieving a bespoke fit
• internal users using their own “document libraries” that don’t reflect the group’s authorised legal position and are not fit for purpose
• the in-house lawyer eventually being made to provide a first draft from scratch by himself, at the expense of large amounts of time and costs

Legal Templates: for a totally inconsequential price point, allows businesses to mitigate all of these challenges and drives a contracting process that is genuinely “business enabling”.

WHAT DOES A GOOD AGREEMENT LOOK LIKE?

A good agreement that positively adds to project or goal realisation, as well as proactively drives contracting process efficiencies, has the following characteristics:

• it uses friendly, plain and easily understood language
• it uses consistent and concise language
• its draws from a clear but disciplined dictionary of defined terms
• there is consistency around the complexity of clause details and mechanics
• there is balanced and proportionate risk allocation
• there is clarity around performance obligations (i.e. the who, what, why, when and how)
• there is clarity around the respective rights of the parties (e.g. what happens if performance is not delivered)
• technical or operational matters are not blended into front-end legal terms
• schedules serve as clear operational chapters for unique subject matter
• it is as short as it can possibly be whilst getting the job done properly
• it is capable of being understood by anyone
• it is capable of being easily translated into other languages
• it is free of technical legal language and concepts.

 

Each and every Legal Template strictly observes these world class drafting principles and in so doing delivers a document that can help you drive contracting process efficiencies.

To illustrate, below is an excerpt from a template: 

A THOUGHT FOR THE LEGAL INDUSTRY

For the GLS Group, as legal industry disruptors, making world class legal support available at a fraction of the cost charged by our competitors is just what we do – it is our business model, and we embrace it.

For the traditional legal industry, however,  the achieving the GLS position is less palatable as time sensitive complexity has historically been what drives the profitability of their time-based engagement model.

‘Long winded discussion over whether the ’quick brown fox jumped over the log' or whether ‘the log was jumped over by the quick brown fox’ have long proved irresistibly profitable for many lawyers' 

However, in an era of abundantly available efficiency technologies, traditional law firms must necessarily re-evaluate their relationship with the contracting process if they are to survive.

GLS believes that:

• firms must “let go” of the notion of charging excessively for basic legal document production - just as architects did when hand drawn blue prints gave way to CAD
• first draft contract preparation is no longer the exclusively domain of the legal practitioners – IT enabled systems can do much of the same work, in much less time
• a firm’s ability/willingness to give affordable access to high quality templates is a direct indicator of how effectively they can aggregate and leverage their expertise for a client’s benefit
• firms must recognise that anything that can be reduced to an “automated workflow” is in fact no longer “lawyering” and so they should stop seeking to charge clients for it

Traditional law firms may find these observations threatening – but GLS feels that these principles serve to make our industry more accessible to clients and allows lawyers to return to a genuine “trusted advisory” role.

Our Legal Templates are making world class legal documents available so that deals can run faster and smoother, and client resources can be spent on genuine “advice” rather than mere document production.

A SUMMARY OF THE BENEFITS OF AUTOMATED DOCUMENTS

Automated document libraries, such as our Legal Template, mean that legal documents can:

• allow for human capacity to be directed at genuinely “value adding” tasks
• be generated to a high quality quickly and in a manner that offers unlimited scalable output
• materially reduce the risks of human error
• be generated and accessed 24/7/365
• create and contribute to deal momentum through speed of production
• reduce and even eliminate production costs
• be easily managed as a “single source of truth” for approved documentation
• allow for tailoring to occur within pre-defined and accepted margins
• be generated to actually match a client’s legal and commercial preferences
• be efficiently updated in line with best practices and/or governing laws

 

To show how Legal Templates delivers world class legal documents cost effectively and quickly, GLS now allows anyone, anywhere to try creating an NDA, entirely for free!

Whilst enjoying this free trial, note that this “garden variety” legal contract is often produced by traditional law firms for USD$500+….

Within seconds of completing an online interview, a world class NDA will be delivered to you, entirely prepared and ready for use – and in any of the 4 languages that GLS currently offers.

A user’s experience of this NDA trial exactly replicates what is experienced by users of our Legal Templates - i.e. it shows how easy it is to achieve speed, cost savings and quality efficiencies all at once!

To reinforce the power of technology-enabled service delivery, GLS will release the NDA trial experience in as many as 8 languages, with Danish, Mandarin, French and Spanish to follow soon.

FURTHER OPTIMISING THE CONTRACTING PROCESS

Our Legal Templates are merely the tip of the contracting efficiency iceberg.

Whilst a superb legal template drives massive contracting process efficiencies, that process can be optimised even further.

To enable such optimisation, GLS offers a range of products that assists in-house legal teams to embed efficiencies throughout their business’s systems.

These products including:

• GLS Clause Bank™: this contains a wide range of best practice clauses to support your negotiations
• GLS Playbook™: this is a guide for non-lawyers on how to negotiate the key clauses of a businesses’ contracts
• GLS 3rd Party Paper Checklists™: this is a tool for an organisation’s contracting team, that ensures that any “third party paper” still meets the standards of their business's authorised contracting positions

 

These solutions can all be found in our industry leading, legal operations centre:

GLS Group, the world’s leading legal industry disruptor, focuses on disrupting the traditional law industry that prevents sustainable access to effective legal support to 97% of business globally.

GLS’s disruptive business model has already reduced legal costs by more than 80% and it is now set to achieve much more in 2019 having invested into NZ based document automation company, Automio.

In a year where GLS was shortlisted by the Financial Times for the “Most Innovative Law Firm Asia Pacific – New Business and Service Delivery Model” award, GLS is now launching its most disruptive offerings yet.

Following its investment into Automio GLS is now stripping out around 95% of the costs that SMEs and Start Up face when trying access legal support via its GLS Total Legal Support™ offering.

INNOVATIVE LEGAL TECHNOLOGY

After 4 years of trialing document automation solutions, and even dabbling in building its own software solution, GLS signed off on a round of investment into Automio in October 2018.

Whilst initially starting as an Automio client, GLS quickly realized that Automio was the right technical partner, a disruptor in its own space, and shared GLS’s vision of what the future of law should look like.  

GLS had found that the contract automation space centered heavily around the Microsoft Word application, which whilst familiar and comfortable to most users, hadn’t really change much in 17 years.

With Word as your base platform, the net result is a bit like connecting a fibre optic cable to a piece of tin can telephone and expecting communications miracles...

Ironically, this is somewhat like the traditional law practice conundrum where legacy practices stifle emergent potential. By contrast, Automio operates its own proprietary platform free of such issues.  

REVOLUTION, ONE CONTRACT AT A TIME…

GLS’ decision to take a significant equity stake in Automio reflects its strategy to develop, promote and partner with legal-technology providers that can enable genuine legal sector disruption.

For GLS: a “genuine” disruptive legal technology is not one that just increases law firm profitability – but rather it is a technology that makes legal support, in its widest sense, more accessible to all businesses.

GENUINE DISRUPTION IN PRACTICE

Over the past 3 months GLS has been working with Automio to perfect the technical delivery of GLS’ most disruptive legal support solution to date – the GLS Total Legal Support™ series.

GLS Total Legal Support™ delivers a legal support advisory experience to Start Ups and SMEs that was previously only accessible to MNC’s … but at around only 5% of the cost.

For a fixed monthly cost, GLS Total Legal Support™, which can now be accessed 24/7/365, anywhere with an internet connection, consists of:

• different tiers of fully automated libraries of essential legal documentation (powered by Automio);
• a dedicated Legal Affairs Director to deliver the “personal advisory touch”;
• an “always on” support hotline for real time queries and emergencies; and
• access to flexible levels of international legal support to match business need.

 

GLS Total Legal Support™ customers get the legal documents they need in unlimited quantities AND their own in-house legal team to direct strategy and provide fixed levels of support resourcing.

For any area of need beyond the “80%” i.e. the day-to-day needs covered by the support plan, customers can access the GLS’s 120+ other offerings, which all cost around 20% of a comparable provider.  

DIRECTION AND STRATEGY

Matthew Glynn, GLS Group Managing Director, said:

“With our new technology-enabled offering we can address 80% of a SME’s needs on a permanent basis – we can quite literally be next to the client all of the time, making a difference in real time.

However, we are doing it in a way that means that lawyers can focus on what they should be doing – lawyering – and we are not charging the client for what technology can do.

Rather than charging for time, we leave it to our ‘technology elves’ to produce the underlying documents at practically nil cost to the customer."

Glynn added:

“Many of my former colleagues in the legal industry say that GLS is creating a race to the bottom with this kind of pricing – a view which I find somewhat incredulous and a tad self-serving.

Traditional law firms simply do not  have any interest in doing anything for US$99 per month, let alone take care of 80% of a Start Up or SME’s legal needs.

However, with our technology we can do this, and do it profitably. We have used technology to support parts of the global economy that have not been able to access it.”

OPTIONS, OPTIONS, OPTIONS: FULL TIME SUPPORT OR JUST WHEN YOU NEED IT

For businesses that still prefer to buy legal contracts “as they go”, GLS has also launched a Legal Docs channel on its extraordinarily popular online GLS Legal Operations Centre.

GLS Legal Docs now has some 67+ world class legal contracts and documents that are available at our entirely disruptive price points – around 15% of what leading legal firms would seek to charge.  

Each document also comes with a 15 minute consultation, if this is needed.

The full menu of Legal Docs is available here. 

COME TEST THE WATERS

To show how incredibly easy it is to work with a true legal automation tool, GLS has taken the unprecedented step of allowing anybody anywhere to try creating a NDA, entirely for free!

To enjoy a free trial experience click here and enjoy it knowing that this “garden variety” legal contract is typically produced by traditional law firms for USD500+

Within seconds of completing an online interview, a world class NDA will be delivered to the user, entirely prepared and ready for use – and in any of the 4 languages GLS currently offers.

The NDA Trial user experience exactly replicates the experience of a user of the full GLS Total Legal Support™ libraries in order to show just how quickly and easily world class documents can be produced.

To reinforce the power of technology enabled service delivery, GLS will release the NDA trial experience in as many as 8 languages by the end of Q1 with Danish, Mandarin, French and Spanish to follow.

GLS Group will shortly be announcing its move into AI based contract reviews in which it will similarly be offering a free NDA trial AI review to demonstrate the power of disruptive legal technologies.

Moving forward, GLS will continue to update and develop its libraries to address the ever-developing needs of the world’s Start-Ups and SMEs. 

GLS will also soon launch a disruptive offering that create customised legal bots for larger MNCs with ambitions of owning their automated contract libraries.

ABOUT GLS

The GLS Group is the world’s leading legal industry disruptor. Founded in 2014 by a core team of highly recognised market leaders from top-tier global law firms (together with some of their clients).

The GLS Group, now has over 200 staff globally and was shortlisted in 2018 by the Financial Times for its “Most Innovative Law Firm Asia Pacific – New Business and Service Delivery Model” award.

GLS’s mission, since its inception, has been to disrupt the second half of that statement and over the past 5 years GLS has now brought the cost of world class legal services down by more than 80% through its “New Law” offering.

On Tuesday of this week GLS Founder, Matt Glynn, attended INSEAD’s MBA programme (Singapore Campus) as a guest lecturer and shared some of the insights gained by GLS as it works on disrupting the legal industry.The lecture asked what aspects of the legal industry could be disrupted and how could budding entrepreneurs access business enabling New Law support to get more business done?

Is the billable hour misaligning the interests of law firms and clients?

What would the size of the addressable legal market be, if most businesses could actually access it??

What would constitute “disruptive technology” in the legal industry?

If lawyers are paid so much, why does the legal industry suffer such a high attrition rate?

Many of the INSEAD students had worked with or used traditional law firms and had some familiarity with traditional private practice law firms (and the frustrations of using them).

These students were therefore incredibly eager to hear that affordable solutions exist and that they are incredibly easy to access!

Matt started by explaining how GLS was created and why it was structured, from the outset, to be fundamentally disruptive to the legal industry.

By way of an example of this disruptive approach in practice, Matt introduce GLS’s newest, and potentially most disruptive new offering – “GLS Total Legal Support” (“TLS”).

TLS is a subscription based support package for start-ups/SMEs, that combines a world class library of automated contracting precedents AND legal advice.

The entry level “Bronze” TLS package can deliver in excess of USD65K worth of support over a year at a cost as low as USD99 per month!

"In effect, GLS TLS makes the kind of in-house legal team that traditionally could only be afforded by large MNCs, accessible to even the smallest of start-ups - all for less than what many spend on Starbucks each month."

Matt went on to explain, that only by breaking away from the traditional model and offering an alternative structure for legal services, such as TLS, could the interests of GLS and clients really become aligned.

GLS’s disruptive approach allows it to help far more businesses get far more business done whilst creating a far larger addressable market, which ironically, Traditional Law has never looked to serve.

The presentation finished off by “lifting the curtain” on how businesses can be engaging with both “Traditional Law” and “New Law” players in a way that lets them get a lot more done with a lot less resources.

In particular, Matt explained 5 key tips that all clients should be employing if they want clear and more practical advice (whilst reducing their legal spend by >50%):

1) Ask “Is your question so special”?

For 80% of any business’s needs, the issue has arisen and been answered comprehensively before. Seek out a New Law response to your question.

For such issues, there is no point in paying traditional law firm rates for a law firm to “reinvent the wheel”.

2) Decide what you want to pay for

The traditional law firm fee model is based on every dollar being split 33% for the lawyer, 33% for Opex and 33% for the profit pot.

So, decide what you want to pay for – consider looking for the lean firm and look for the boutique advisor if you don’t want to pay over the odds.

3) Understand what you are getting?

Law firm advice is prepared in a Professional Indemnity context which necessarily entails significant qualifications and caveats – caution is clearly required.

By way of a simple comparison: a formal legal opinion is PI backed, but the “yes or no” advice given by an in-house lawyer is what actually get’s the business “done”.

4) Recognise the nature of the law

Laws are often prohibitive, not permissive. So, there is often a disconnect when client’s construct their questions in the permissive form.

Businesses could do well to pose their questions on the basis of “is there any clear guidance which prevents what we intend to do?” Such answers are frequently more categoric and more efficiently sourced.

5) Make the lawyer get back to lawyering

Lawyers love to fix things – so let them.

Take your complexity there - but not your project management.

Ask early - late is expensive - but only ask after you have followed the first 4 tips!

THANKS: 

Thank you again INSEAD for the invitation to teach and learn from such an engaging group of Students!

Thank you Alexia Adda (a lawyer at the offshore firm Walkers, and current student of INSEAD) that made this event happen.

The true cost of the hourly rate

GLS believes that more than 95% of businesses globally are unable to access effective legal support either at all, or in the quantities they require – principally because of price barriers.

In Part 1 of this series, we explored how TradLaw’s commitment to the "Have, Cake & Eat" model relies upon clients assuming the cost of operational inefficiencies and overindulgences.

In this Part 2, we highlight a range of inefficiencies frequently present in the TradLaw model that flow as a direct result of TradLaw’s prevailing economic model and ensuing management culture.

The hourly rate remains the primary economic model pursued by TradLaw and essentially makes the adoption of service-based efficiencies an economically irrational choice for TradLaw. 

The associated 'culture' that has emerged within TradLaw management has only further exacerbated the acute inaccessibility of TradLaw to the global business community.

There is nothing funny about the resulting irony which the business community feels every day. TradLaw is actually unable to reduce its hourly rates to where the market needs them to be and yet at the same time it is not ready to let go of the hourly rate model.

We choose to highlight these inefficiencies, and their underlying cause, because the pathway for the legal industry to address and respond to this is clear – for those brave enough to tread it.

The emergence of industry disruptors like GLS (and those we fund) mean the best days of the legal industry are ahead!

We operate at 20% of the cost of comparable legal service providers whilst maintaining the same world-class quality – it’s as simple as that.

Big Law, Big Bills

Much of TradLaw has vigorously pursued short-term profit maximisation, while remaining wedded to a stunning array of inefficient practices that clients (and lawyers) have had to bear.

TradLaw and especially Big Law, has, whether due to tradition, ego or otherwise, allocated vast quantities of capital into platform features that do not create or readily translate into client value.

Consider the inefficiencies below: we will start with the more recognisable inefficiences and then move onto the more systemic structural issues, the chief among which is the billable hour.

As you review these inefficiencies – ask yourself – in how many other industries would they be able to exist before being eliminated by competitive market forces?

Inefficient: Premium CBD Premises

Before cars (and certainly before faxes, internet and emails) law firms needed to be located close to the courts and their clients, who were often clustered in the CBD.

The same cannot be said today where face-to-face meetings are increasingly infrequent. Lawyers can go months without actually seeing a client in person.

The cost of premium, and often self-aggrandising, CDB location premises are, in today's technological environment, an unnecessary indulgence which create very little client value.

Nice, but not necessary!

Inefficient: Ignoring transformative technology

Few industries have proven more resistant to the introduction of service delivery technologies than the legal industry.

In most other sectors, technology has been embraced to drastically increase output and lower production costs for the client/customer's benefit and preserve one’s competitive edge.

TradLaw, and particularly Big Law which can afford game changing technology, has failed to embrace technology where it matters, i.e. at the point of service delivery.

Why has this been the case? Simple. The longer it takes a TradLaw firm to complete a task (i.e. the more hours sold) the more it gets paid. 

"It is economically irrational for TradLaw to embrace efficiency as long as it remains wedded to hourly rate architecture."

TradLaw’s business has centered around selling the market what it increasingly does not want - time. Which leads us nicely to the next point ...

Inefficient: Failure to commoditise

Law is a knowledge-based industry where expertise is merely an aggregation of experience. 

We all know that business want solutions delivered with price certainty. Why then have commoditised, fixed price, knowledge-based products by and large failed to emerge?

The reality is that most areas of law remain static for sufficient periods of time to allow for the development of knowledge-based products and solutions – the wheel does not need reinventing at every turn.

Knowledge aggregation and its ease of access and retrieval is a key indicator of just how efficient a law firm is. It also allows fixed pricing models to emerge – something clients absolutely want.

So, where are these knowledge-based products?

The reality is that commoditised knowledge products do not involve the sale of hours and therefore do not make comfortable bedfellows for the Have Cake & Eat model.

Accordingly, the economies of scale that all other industries achieve from aggregation and volume are not pursued by Big Law and are generally not available to legal industry clients.

Note too that clients essentially want "yes" or "no" answers – "can I do this or not?". If many areas of law permit such responses, then why have law firms not responded to these demands?

Inefficient: Global Full Service Models

Big Law’s 'one-stop-shop' approach, discussed in more depth in our previous article, leads to what we call the "Pac-Man Model".  

Do you remember the Pac-Man gorging on ghosts? Similarly, Big Law's mouth tends to remain open, taking on anything and everything.

The economic imperatives of Big Law creates a gravitational pull away from strategic service excellence to a focus on volume – this leads to firms using their own people/offices even when the expertise/experience is lacking.

For those that have worked at Big Law – you will know that not all offices are equal, but the rates generally are!

Inefficient: Law firm management

"The problem with law firms is that they are run by lawyers!"

Law firms tend to choose leaders from within their own ranks; effectively, Big Law takes its best moneymakers and applies them to jobs they are by and large unqualified to do. 

Ineffectual and inexperienced management, whether global or regional, can bring with it a tremendous cost, which will inevitably be borne by clients.

The stories we could share with you on this one … the firm that bought a word processing system that perhaps two other organisations in the world would use or the Group Head that booked a practice Group Retreat and forgot to invite the other offices...

Inefficient: Ignoring the face time phenomenon

The fairly challenged Partnership Model which actually sees very few people truly benefiting may provide the backdrop to Big Law’s enduring attachment to the practice of "face to face" meetings.

At the drop of a hat Big Law’s partners are the first to jump to embrace the internal meeting, conferences and management retreats – and if some frequent flyer points inure then great!

How do grand auditoriums and international get-togethers with the associated business class flights, five star hotels and so on, really add client value? The answer is they do not.  

Frankly, the costs of the "internal get together" culture make the bills for taxis home after a particular hour, meals, replacement shirts and expenses over weekends, etc. – all seem a tad insignificant.

However, someone has been paying for it – and it hasn’t just been clients – the lawyers working in private practice are also paying the price (more on that in Part 3).

Lets now look at some of the more systemic causes of inefficiency associated with the way in which TradLaw is frequently organised and how it causes structural inefficiencies.

Inefficient: The Partnership Model

Law firms are owned and managed by partners who are primarily remunerated by direct reference to fee generation – a principle that can create both internal and external conflict.

That is, what a partner takes home to spend on his or her family is, by and large, dependent on achieving a personal/group budget. Progression at the associate level follows a similar path.

Organisational and skill deployment decisions by the firm may not always be aligned with the principle of identifying the "best lawyer for the job" or for that matter

The hourly rate is no longer an effective meeting point for those that need legal support and those that provide it.  Query if it ever was?

So, we asked a question:

How can we make world-class legal solutions accessible at a fixed price that all businesses globally can access?

We then built a business around the answer.

Welcome to Global Legal Solutions.  Law Rewritten.

 

The traditional law firm model (“TradLaw”) as we know it is broken; but fortunately, a new dawn is upon the legal industry and its best days are unquestionably still ahead.

In this four-part series, Global Legal Solutions (“GLS”) unpacks the demise of so called ‘TradLaw’ and the rise of alternative solutions for disillusioned lawyers and dissatisfied clients.

In this first article we explain what “TradLaw” is and identify the forces of change that are reshaping the legal industry – taking it into a better place, one where business can actually access it. 

TradLaw does not like change.  Given that there are still a few more years of higher profits within easy “redundancy” driven reach, many players will continue to resist the inevitable.

Nevertheless, the TradLaw model is in a serial state of decay - business cannot access it.        

TradLaw - having their cake and eating it

TradLaw is the classic owner/partner law firm model built upon hourly rate architecture.  Time is the unit of trade, and how much time is sold is the essential management/performance/productivity KPI.   

The model focuses on short-term profit maximisation whilst remaining wedded to a wide variety of inherently inefficient operating practices that actually prevent optimised service delivery.

We call this the “Have Cake & Eat” model – and oh how much cake has been eaten over the years!

For over a century, the Have Cake & Eat model has made TradLaw partners rich.  The resulting costs of legal services, however, have now finally proven too much for most businesses globally. 

The inarguable reality is that even the biggest businesses globally are unable to afford access to quality legal support, either at all or in the quantities they would like.  Or is your business different?

Who are the culprits?

Unfortunately, the Have Cake & Eat model is prevalent across much of the legal industry – most firms are heavily influenced by hourly rate architecture and its associated decision making.

Just how ill-suited this model is for the future is demonstrated by the incredibly short life cycle of Big Law - the legal industry’s response to globalisation – a phenomenon that should actually bring prices down!

Big Law was set up to provide what smaller law firms could not - heavy lift, ‘full-service’ and diverse legal capabilities, increasingly across borders.  It is now the most expensive form of TradLaw.

At its peak, Big Law was only ever accessible to a fraction of the overall MNC business community - principally the investment banks and Fortune 500 type companies.

Despite the appeal of a globalised legal ‘one-stop-shop’, even the biggest global corporates cannot justify the cost, and many have abandoned Big Law for more cost effective alternatives.

The same backlash is faced by most TradLaw operators, whether big or small.  The brutal truth is that the global business community considers TradLaw (and especially Big Law) to be cost inaccessible.  

Access to knowledge has always levelled the playing field and every law firm has an internet connection.  In the case of Big Law, geographic coverage alone cannot and does not justify the fees that Big Law charge.

"The party is well and truly over!"

 

A delicious irony - famine where there ought to be feast

There is a delicious irony in that TradLaw’s model is rapidly approaching the end of its shelf life at a time when global demand for legal support is at an all-time high. 

"Irrespective of the global financial crisis (the “GFC”), the global economy needs its lawyers now more than ever."  

 

Businesses worldwide are choking on increased regulation – it is getting harder (not easier) for businesses to do business, especially across borders.

Yet, paradoxically, supply and demand (being the vast, pent up pool of latent demand that exists globally) is not connecting efficiently via the TradLaw construct.

The problem is not what TradLaw is offering, but how it is being offered.

The legal industry must find a new way of connecting supply and demand and TradLaw is not the answer.  Fortunately, new ways are emerging, and organisations like GLS are leading the way.

Take just 90 seconds to see how we are making world-class legal support available on a global basis at not more than 20% of the cost of comparable world class providers. Click here to view video.

The omens of demise

Despite intensifying dissatisfaction with the current TradLaw model amongst clients and practitioners alike, the omens of impending demise are being ignored by most TradLaw operators. 

Sadly, nowhere is the proverbial ostrich's head buried more deeply in the sand than in the case of our old friend ‘Big Law’. 

Much of TradLaw (especially Big Law) is so heavily burdened by its own structural, cultural and economic inefficiencies that its ability to affect a corrective pivot to where clients need it is limited.

A century of the Have Cake & Eat model reliably delivering super profits has given many TradLaw operators a false sense of confidence, especially when PEP can still be easily increased.

Flat lined markets continue to be dismissed by many as being “GFC down” aggravated by a “cyclical temporary oversupply of lawyers” to be corrected by rounds of redundancies and early partner exits.

And a new phenomenon has emerged - excess capacity within Big Law’s ranks is now being bundled into the so-called premium brand, low cost offering.  Slightly cheaper units of time are now available.

Is this enlightened management, market insight or simply redundancy without the charge?  To us it sounds like Big Law being Big Law – people being sacrificed at the altar of profit.

Dividing 10 by 3 instead of 5 to keep the PEP on the rise can only go on for so long.  Self-cannibalisation in the absence of the desire or ability to affect a strategic structural response is not sustainable.

Change within TradLaw can only come from the top but its leaders are typically in their sunset years; taking a PEP hit “for the team” in order to effect the necessary structural change is hardly likely.  

How do you think that “home-front” conversation will play out? “Honey I shrunk the pay-cheque, but the next generation are going to be in better shape”.  Let’s revisit the headcount shall we!

Our profession deserves more than this.

"Darwinian evolutionary theory has not granted the legal industry an exemption, it has just been a bit slow to arrive."

So what next?

As any good story requires, even in our forlorn industry, hope springs eternal; Darwinian evolutionary theory has not granted the legal industry an exemption, it has just been a bit slow to arrive.

Our industry is becoming far more accessible.  GLS, and others like us, are utilising new business models to remove time and cost as barriers to businesses needing the highest quality legal support.

As an industry, our best years are ahead.  It has never been a better time to be a lawyer - not only is there a lot of work available to be done, the work we must do is important.

Years of quantitative easing/fiscal stimulus has done little to lift the GFC cloud – only businesses doing business can do that – and we (the lawyers) must be accessible to make that happen.

In our next article we will identify the inefficiencies that Big Law could easily eradicate and bring legal costs down by 80%.  That is what we have achieved at GLS.  

We are 20% of the cost of Big Law – yet offer our clients access to the same quality of lawyers in the same markets.  In fact, most of our lawyers have joined us from Big Law. Whilst Big Law is firing, GLS is hiring globally.

In subsequent articles we will show how separation from the billable hour and reconciliation with disengaged employees is the key to the modernisation of the legal industry.  

Finally, we at GLS categorically dismiss Big Law’s claims of there being an over-supply of lawyers -  the only thing in over-supply is over-priced and cost inaccessible lawyers! 

Welcome to GLS - Law Rewritten

Without strong, healthy and educated children our sustained future is questionable. Yes there are those children that have all they need, but there are many, many more that have nothing at all.  It is the joy in being in a position to be able to make a difference to a young life and to see how that difference can translate into an opportunity (or something else special) that drives us.

Everyone deserves the best start possible – how can we possibly expect the next generation to be the best they can be, to be the next generation of doctors, scientists, even lawyers, if the very foundation upon which to grow is lacking. Without a decent start, their chances of success are greatly reduced and if we can somehow make a small difference even to just one child we will have achieved what we set out to do.

We considered whether or not to sponsor a chair at a university to assist in further studies and various other options but believe offering support at the 'grassroots' level is where we believe we can make the most happen.

Many of our team are parents themselves and see how their children flourish in the right environment. Why should an orphaned or underprivileged child be refused this simply because of the circumstances that they were born into and through no fault or no choice of their own?

We want to offer help and support to the most vulnerable and underprivileged children - whether it is providing an environment and tools to help them learn, donating funds to support the provision of medical needs or whether it is simply being there to provide a voice and a network to support them.

We feel rightly obligated to give back to the world from which we have benefitted. We are truly grateful for the privileges and opportunities that we had growing up (e.g. access to medicine, shelter, education, and a safe and loving environment in which to develop) and want to do our best to help allow as many children as possible to experience the same.

We must “start at the very beginning, a very good place to start” (“Mary Poppins”). If we don’t start with babies, what hope do they have growing up without the tools they need to equip them for life in general?

We hope that by donating 10% of our global profits to projects across the world that focus on making a difference to the lives of the most vulnerable children, we too are contributing. This support and opportunity will hopefully give them what they need to unlock their full potential.

If you too want to be involved in any of our projects just let us know ... you would be most welcome to join us.

GLS Law will only offer support where we know that we can do so in a way that represents a "by far and away market leading" support proposition. This means that being just a "little bit better" is not good enough.  Our support proposition must at all times be a lot better than what is generally offered. This is how we are guaranteed to stand out.

Our commitment to market leading support is absolute and inviolable - our whole business has been built from the ground up to achieve this result. If our support proposition does not represent a "by far and away market leading" proposition then we will cease to offer it. Support from GLS must and always will be a superior option.

So, what makes the GLS Law support proposition market leading? Well, the simple answer is our 'Optimal Efficiency Framework' - it governs all the decisions we make and how we deliver our support.

Our commitment to 'optimal efficiency' is unwavering and resides in our DNA. From our organisational design through to all our operational methods - we do not engage in activities that do not create 'optimally efficient' client outcomes. We are committed to making our world class support increasingly accessible to our clients - big or small - without price discrimination.  Not only do we have to deliver ever improving quality, we have to make sure that that quality of our support becomes increasingly accessible to all businesses.

Being optimally efficient is as much about what we 'refrain from doing' as it is about 'what we do'.  

Our 'Optimal Efficiency Framework' requires that how we operate and what we offer must strictly meet each of the following requirements:

• focus: we focus on specific areas of support (corporate, commercial and special projects) - being the areas of need faced by most businesses - we cannot be all things to all business
• simplicity: our support proposition must be simple to implement and provide an immediate and effective support to the challenges faced by our clients
• client-centric: our support (and what we charge) must be free, and remain free, of any elements that do not benefit the end customer
• efficient: how we operate must be free, and remain free, of the historic, structural, cultural and economic inefficiencies that are endemic to Big Law platforms
• verifiable: our support must tangibly and demonstrably increase the effectiveness of each clients' existing legal resources
• procurable: our offering must be an imminently sensible and justifiable procurement choice
• accesible: we must be accessible to both large and small businesses
• alignment: we must maintain as near to 100% interest alignment as possible between us, our employees and you, our client.

So, there it is - this is what makes shapes every aspect of GLS Law. It is only when all of the above conditions are met that we put our name, GLS Law, to the support proposition. If we are unable to offer a support scenario that complies with our 'Optimal Efficiency Framework' then it will not see the light of day. 

You may be asking "why would we just give it away like that?". Well, that's a good question. The reality is that most law firms will be unable to pivot in the direction taken by GLS Law in any event. Their entire model is based around an hourly rate architecture which prevents strategic adaptation. An inefficient platform cannot produce efficient results. An hourly rate offered from an inefficient platform is required to subsidise those inefficiencies.  

We believe that much of the legal industry is riddled with structural, cultural, economic and historic inefficiencies that go back more than a century.  This means that despite the huge hourly rates Big Law charges, they still 'hit the bone' pretty quickly when they try and move their prices to where the market requires it. Again, an inefficient platform cannot produce efficient results - not without someone paying the price. 

We believe that the only way the industry can end its free-fall/free fall into further 'inaccessibility' is if more players move into the provision of genuinely accessible service delivery. New things must be tried. We are happy for others to follow our lead. The more that do so the better our industry will become. 

At the heart of our offering is combining 'outstanding talent' with 'superior processes'. We then apply the transformative effect of technology enabled solutions. Technology-enabled legal support makes 'better', 'faster' and 'cheaper' (i.e. - 'optimal efficiency') possible for much of the legal services continuum. To be clear - quality is greatly improved whilst decreasing the cost of access. This has worked in every other industry so why not law? The legal industry cannot and should not continue to resist the transformative impact of technology. 

GLS Law's culture is to introduce 'technology' into the design and implementation of our legal support scenarios so as to deliver exceptional 'optimal efficiency'. Not only are our lawyers more accessible, but we give them ways to achieve greater productivity. We give them the resources to allow them to focus on lawyering and not other tasks which do not constitute lawyering but are frequently on charged as such (e.g. typing, proof reading, etc.). GLS Law strives to deliver greater quality and reducing costs of access. 

GLS Law cannot change the entire legal industry by itself - we want others to join us as we create a better industry - one that business can be proud of. It is for this reason that despite making 'by the hour' lawyering far more accessible than it has ever been - our focus is on doing away with the hourly rate wherever we can. This is why we are working so hard in the fixed price solutions space. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements in this regard... 

For those who are wondering what has happened to the traditional legal industry, please take a look at the following short clip which provides some outstanding insights into an industry bloated by its own greed.

The clip lends support to GLS' view that an almost universal dissatisfaction now exists with and within the industry. 

Take a look at the clip and let us know what you think ...

Today was without doubt one of best days of my professional life for it was surely work in the legal industry that made it possible. Today my wife and I visited an extremely special place in Gorlovka, Ukraine. We visited the children's specialist ward at Hospital No. 2 and met some real life Angels, some new to this world and a few that have been around for a little longer.

For those of you who don't know much about the Ukraine, it is Europe's poorest country. The Ukraine has been literally pillaged by decades of rampant out of control corruption. In what should be one of Europe's greatest countries blessed with an abundance of natural resources, the average monthly salary in a city like Gorlovka (and much of the rest of the Ukraine) is just USD500. It is no wonder that much of the country looks back to the former USSR with great fondness - life was better then.

If the last few decades have not been tough enough already, this beautiful country is now in a state of civil war. But the people of the Ukraine are strong - this is what survival requires. Here, family is strong, tradition is strong, culture is strong - the people are passionate. But for some though, in this already tough country, life will be harder still. Life will not begin with or offer the comforts of the Ukraine's greatest treasure - family.

Sadly, in the Ukraine many children are abandoned at birth to the care of a State that is bankrupt. A mother who gives birth can sign a form and her child is whisked away into State care - there is more paperwork involved in selling a car. We at GLS so desperately wanted to help these children because who could be more deserving of a little bit of help than a beautiful baby who has entered this world in such a harsh fashion.

Having previously had cause to visit the children's hospital in Gorlovka, we had decided that this was where GLS would initiate its first project. Just try and imagine what a public health care system would be like in the Ukraine, particularly at this time when funding for many public institutions in the East of Ukraine has been interrupted. The tireless doctors just do not have the basic resources, let alone medical supplies, they need. Yet, each day they perform seeming miracles in the circumstances. Cries are quieted, tummies are filled, and pain is eased. Health is returned for many.

When we asked how we could help Hospital No. 2, we thought it might be a new x-ray machine that was needed. We were blown away by what they requested. It was not some new high-tech piece of medical equipment - it was just simply baby change tables. The ones that they had were so old and dilapidated that it was unsafe to place babies on them to change their nappies and otherwise administer care.

We dutifully commissioned the construction of 16 new hospital grade baby preparation tables - two for each room in the children's ward. Today we delivered those tables to Hospital No. 2. The gratitude with which these tables were received was humbling. Just think about it - the biggest help we could provide was a sturdy change table upon which to prepare these newborn Little Angels. When we asked what next we could do, they showed us their baby cots. Believe us - we have our next project!

The nurses in this hospital earn around USD120 per month - the doctors not much more - USD250 month. The staff at Hospital No. 2 care for these babies as though they were their own. These children, and so many more just like them, need more than a little help and we were so pleased to be able to contribute.

There is still so much more to be done, particularly for those children who, when they are well enough to leave the hospital, will be taken to a State orphanage. We met some of those babies today and it was impossibly difficult to consider their fate - life ought to be kinder to these Little Angels.

My 16-month old son has just climbed up on the bed where I have literally just finished this post. He is jumping around on the bed just as happy as can be. I am sure he knows how much he is loved but I feel the need to go and hold him close and tell him again for the twentieth time today. And, as I do, I think of those children at Hospital No. 2, and all those hospitals across the world just like it. Where is their home? Such Angels deserve a far better welcome to this world.