MEDIUM-SIZED LEGAL DEPARTMENTS
LAW DEPARTMENTS: MEDIUM-SIZED COMPANIES
Challenge
Legal departments of medium-sized companies have a Herculean task. They are usually concerned with many issues at the same time: the breadth and depth of their services, making or buying decisions themselves, working together with the specialist departments, providing appropriate legal support for international business, dealing with tight budgets, managing internal and external legal resources, time and self-management, balancing the roles of service provider and risk manager and, finally, nothing less than the appropriate positioning of law within the company.
We support the legal management in setting the strategic course so that the legal department is prepared for the future, works on the right issues and can concentrate on what brings the highest added value to the company.
We help to design the processes in such a way that the legal department can work faster and more cost-efficiently in its advice and is thus valued as a true business partner for the operative business.
We advise on the selection and implementation of systems that considerably relieve the day-to-day operations of the legal department. Making data and information available on one platform, reducing redundancies, reliably automating standards and routines and, as a result, saving a lot of valuable time for the actual legal advice.
After an organizational check of the legal department, which enables us to assess the tasks, procedures, resources, systems, communication, etc., we discuss the direction and process of the consultation with the legal management (usually together with the responsible management). Since the legal department usually operates in a matrix function, the departments involved and the management board are involved as far as necessary. The legal management is part of the joint project management and remains “master of the house” at all times.
From our own practical application and advice, we are familiar with the issues of strategic positioning, organization, structure, process flows, daily influences and the various (sometimes contradictory) demands on the legal department. We have processed the relevant management issues of a typical mid-sized legal department in a practical form manual in the form of samples and checklists. However, we also know that each sub-topic has its own individual framework and requires individualized solutions. And that is exactly what we offer.
We can name the following cases from the last 20 years of our law firm consulting, with many examples overlapping; at the core, it is always about culture change:
- Support for the introduction of a contract management system in the legal department of a medium-sized logistics group