This month, Lawyer Monthly hears from Elena Servini, Associate Solicitor, Corporate & Commercial, and Acuity Counsel Director at Acuity Legal Limited, a commercial firm headquartered in Cardiff and with an office in London, UK. Elena answers some questions about her role and about the firm’s diverse legal services, but specifically confronts the question: ‘Is it better to outsource legal counsel, or hire an in-house lawyer?’
How have you witnessed the evolution of legal services over the last few years?
Acuity’s focus is on commercial transactions, primarily corporate and real estate. We have seen that clients are not just looking for us to provide them with legal services – technical legal knowledge is a given – they also want added-value services such as increased efficiencies in the form of project management skills backed up by technology. Gone are the days of five trainees indexing boxes of documents for weeks at a time, which was one of my first ever jobs. Clients are also looking for us to work smarter to save them money.
One of the ways we do this is by looking at how we staff a transaction. We now use transaction managers (who are not qualified lawyers) to manage the non-legal aspects of transactions and help them run more smoothly, freeing up the lawyers to deliver on the technical aspects of the deal.
How do you think lawyers can work more efficiently and better engage with their clients?
Transactional lawyers need to learn other skills to complement their legal knowledge, for example project management skills, and widen the skill set of a team by creative employment; not all members of a team working on a transaction will be lawyers.
Lawyers can also cut down on the admin burden on clients and be prepared to take on some of the risk. We are a regulated profession and we have to do certain things to engage with our clients, which can be perceived by the client as obstructive. So the challenge is to achieve a balance between following the rules and not annoying your clients.
What do you believe should be the primary considerations and priorities of an in-house lawyer?
Only thing I can say is that feed back from our clients indicates that in-house-lawyers are expected to participate more at board level in the strategy of the business, rather than getting bogged down in day-to-day legal work.
Can you explain to LM what the Acuity Counsel service involves and what impact it has had?
We developed the Acuity Counsel service in response to the amount of day-to-day work we were doing for our clients (as opposed to transactional work for which we are better known).
We identified a need to develop an offering as a trusted legal partner to support a finance director or an in-house legal team. It is aimed at mid sized businesses – big enough to have day-to-day legal needs but not big enough for significant inhouse resource.
We work with our client to establish their anticipated legal spend over the coming year and break that down into a monthly allocation which is charged at a flat hourly rate. If the client does not use their hours they roll forward to the next month and if they overuse their hours in one month they are deducted from the next month’s allocation.
Most businesses find legal work comes in peak and troughs and this way of working gives clients plenty of flexibility. We don’t tie anyone in – there is no annual commitment; we want our clients to enjoy working with us and for us to get to know their business and become their first point of call on legal issues. We give monthly or more regular updates on hours so clients can keep a close eye on their legal spend.
Why can outsourcing the right legal counsel at times be more beneficial than instructing an inhouse lawyer?
Outsourcing helps you get the right specialism for the right piece of work. A mid-sized business without the resources to employ a team of in-house lawyers will find they are unable to cover every specialism, or manage the volume of legal work they are likely to generate.
A law firm such as Acuity has experts in a variety of areas – for example commercial contracts, dispute resolution, employment and real estate – who are up to date with the latest legal developments and supported by teams of people and technology.
Accessing this in the right way and at the right pricemeans a business can avoid the uncertainties, commitment and overheads that come with employment.
Rather than choosing to work either with an outsourced legal counsel or your in-house legal counsel, is it possible that the two could work best together to meet the needs of a business?
Yes and we do this at Acuity through Acuity Counsel. The inhouse lawyer can direct strategy and manage the legal workflow of the business while we support them in specialist areas and tackle the day-to-day work, which frees them up to look at the bigger picture.
We can also help on the project management side by, for example, helping to put in place contract procedures, protocols and lines of communication between the in-house lawyer, ourselves and other teams in the business to ensure the work gets done efficiently but with all the necessary checks and approvals.
For the business itself, the board has the reassurance that a specialist law firm is supporting its in-house legal team at a fixed cost. This gives certainty that legal risk is being effectively managed.
You believe client autonomy is important; can you please explain why?
Directors and managers of businesses are sophisticated individuals. We work in particular with a lot of owner-managed businesses and these clients need to be involved in every aspect of their business. Many managing or finance directors with whom we work have knowledge of what it takes to negotiate a contract or of how to protect their brand.
We do not believe legal services are a ‘dark art’, to be delivered in an impenetrable way to preserve their mystery. We prefer to work on an open and transparent basis with a view to developing a partner relationship with our clients – as if we are part of their team, rather than just a service provider.
To this end we have developed and recently launched the Acuity Counsel Client Portal, which contains a wealth of precedent documents, tool kits, checklists and articles. This enables clients to access information and carry out certain tasks (such as preparing a first draft non-disclosure agreement) themselves if they wish, with us available at the end of the phone to answer questions or check off the final version.
The portal also contains copies of documents we have concluded for our client so the client can avoid having to come back to us to ask for copies once they have become buried in an exemployee’s email in-box.
How can outsourced legal counsels also reduce the burden of administrative processes on their clients and what impact could this have?
We try really hard to make Acuity Counsel as accessible as possible. One of the ways we do this is by having a one-stage engagement process at the start of the relationship. We do not repeat this before each piece of work – the client is free to pick up the phone to anyone in the firm at any time in the knowledge that they are being charged the same rate if they are speaking to a senior partner as they would be speaking to an associate.
There is no need to agree a fee for each piece of work, and we do not stop work once the core monthly hours have been used. As we report to the client on a monthly basis (more often if required), there are no surprises when it comes to fees.
How do you think the proliferation of practising women in legal counsel has affected the legal services landscape?
I think it’s fairly well accepted that businesses have been quicker than law firms to adopt flexible working policies. These are attractive to everyone, not just women, given the demands of caring for others that are placed on many who nevertheless wish to continue with a professional career.
Businesses that are able to look forward in this way are in a position to attract some great talent, which would otherwise be tied up in private practice. These individuals are going to bring a great deal of experience and knowledge to a business, as well as introducing smarter ways of working, particularly on the transaction management side.
When working with outside law firms, expectations are likely to be high and this can only encourage law firms to raise standards to compete for the best work.
