Commercial lawyers in London – Unlocking business value through law.

by Hudson Mckenzie Lawyers and Solicitors who understand you

Conventionally, big law firms and corporate legal departments have fostered a close relationship—one that is based on both trust and regulation. Clients count on commercial lawyers in London to discern legal boundaries and the risks associated with misjudging them; counsel are under a professional obligation to identify and raise potential problems and to handle them competently and thoroughly. Most corporate legal work is outsourced because it’s not cost-effective to employ enough in-house lawyers to meet companies’ diverse needs. And work is allocated by in-house lawyers, most of whom started their careers and were trained at law firms.

That close relationship is being changed. Company executives are much less patient with the status quo than they used to be; there’s a general sense that lawyers and their fees are out of control. It’s not just the size of any particular bill that irks executives; it’s that they feel they have little influence over what they spend and what they get for it—and that the accountability seems to be much less than what most other business services providers.

Executives now have a lot more choice about how to get their legal work done. Commercial lawyers in London can use technology to support pretrial discovery and automate some basic tasks, bring in high-end temporary lawyers to manage major projects, and send routine processing work overseas. These and other dramatic changes are affecting the practice and business of law across the globe, but particularly in the United States and the UK, where most of the world’s largest law firms are based.

It’s our belief that corporate legal departments are at the risk of missing an important opportunity. Far too many of them are looking for relatively small, short-term savings, and doing so in a way that could critically damage key relationships. Corporations should aim higher. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do four significant things:

(1) Assign legal work to the providers best suited to a particular task, rather than paying a premium for one-stop shopping; (2) lower legal costs without sacrificing quality; (3) create greater transparency and accountability; and (4) derive greater value from in-house counsel.

When your company or your division ends up in litigation, comes under investigation, becomes party to a complex transaction, or simply seeks to improve compliance with a dizzying array of cross-border regulations, you often need outside legal assistance. At that point you tend to lose control over who is put on the assignment, how long it will take, and what the outcome and the ultimate cost will be. It would be difficult to argue that cost savings should be the top priority at “bet the company” moments, but most legal matters are more routine than that. And even large, complex issues can be divided into discrete tasks, many of which don’t require senior-level attention. Think of document review for pretrial discovery, or due diligence for a major transaction: Both can be done more efficiently and just as effectively by other service providers. Why, then, have companies been slow to embrace change in those instances?