lpc: Improving life for in-house legal departments

In-house legal departments face ever greater pressures especially as difficult times impose:-

• greater budget constraints
• additional workloads
• added responsibilities
• potentially greater conflicts with the managers of the business
• added pressures to control external solicitors' costs

So how can lpc help, especially when budgets for consultancy are inevitably constrained?

The services that lpc offer to inhouse legal departments will save money and in many cases substantially so. Any proposal will include an economic model illustrating cost, return and payback elements together with details of assumptions or conditionality. lpc have longstanding expertise in costing legal and quasi legal functions for FTSE100 companies and large organisations. This experience enables lpc to substantiate the value of their services in hard figures.

How can lpc assist inhouse departments?

On the lpc Services page a detailed list is provided of the functions that lpc deliver. the table providing an indication of those services applicable to inhouse departments is reproduced on the right..

Inevitably such a list cannot encompass all of the requirements of inhouse departments; as such it is worth describing the principles by which lpc work with inhouse teams. lpc recognise the varying requirements of inhouse departments and the various limitations under which they may operate. It is by figuratively standing in the shoes of an inhouse team that lpc can design a solution for its needs. This is often a skill that eludes consultants when dealing with inhouse teams, imposing preset notions that may simply not be appropriate.

A general summary of the areas in which lpc can provide assistance to an inhouse department is as follows:

• where the inhouse team is carrying out a legal function, re-engineering that function to make it more efficient, more effective and less costly to execute. As can be seen from lpc's article on Process Engineering such advances can generally be made without meaningful capital expenditure


• where the inhouse team is interacting with external legal and other suppliers, refining those relationships to reduce cost and increase effectiveness. These improvements may be achieved by improved document design systems, re-engineering or a combination of both.


• controlling the cost and maintenance of external legal and other suppliers - lpc have substantial experience of procurement processes albeit differing from others offering apparently similar services by recognising that service and cost are just part of the picture. Modern procurement methods work well in controlling cost though less often in properly defining service. They invariably fail however in that the procurement and control process often sits uncomfortably with the most important aim of a business or organisation - to treat its customers and stakeholders in a human, flexible and reasonable manner.
  
  Understanding these relationships creates both short and long term benefits for the business or organisation. As described elsewhere lpc place great value in knowledge management; value in procurement is essentially ephemeral unless it is tied to knowledge that can be permanently accessed and understood by the client business or organisation. The typical scorecard process favoured by many procurement and relationship teams often works poorly in legal services. As with all such evaluation methods, rapidly those involved see themselves being measured on their ability to meet the test rather than the immediate and permanent value of service delivery. It is rather like those schools where the children are taught specifically to pass exams as against understanding the subject.
  
  So how do lpc avoid these pitfalls? Firstly by an empathetic understanding of the obstacles that all of the parties to the process have to avoid; secondly, wherever possible, designing a superior process, where "hard" issues capable of being enumerated are counted and "soft" issues are valued appropriately; and thirdly, using lpc's re-engineering skills, by dividing processes into "rules" and "knowledge" streams.

In the sporting arena it is often said that the performance of an umpire or referee can be assessed by how little the players or crowd discuss that umpire or referee. Similarly the involvement of a consultant with an inhouse team should be as non-disruptive as possible and for as short a period as possible.

With its emphasis on empathetic relationships, fixed fees and no surprises lpc aim to ensure maximum value and minimum disruption for inhouse legal teams.