July 5, 2024
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Are you a lawyer, or does your company regularly need legal support? Then you know it: demand is often higher than the supply. Due to its very high dependency on human work, legal support can become a serious bottleneck.
The two levers to solve this are reducing/delaying demand (if and when possible) or moving the peaks.
Wait! What? Move the peaks? How? This is what we will address in this article.
Simply put, a peak period in a legal service is a moment in time when the current need for legal support exceeds the current capacity.
One can identify the peak period by its gradual consequences:
The peaks occur mostly due to the annual cycles of the company.
During the months of April to July, there are corporate meetings, fiscal deadlines and the goal to have many deals booked before the summer pause. Then in autumn, the end of the fiscal and civil year nearing, other deadlines and the same appetite for closing deals before the New Year appears.
These cycles have all in common that, at some point, they need legal support.
This creates a perfect storm that, as the pressure piles up, does not only load the to-do list but also derail legal support routines and efficiency.
This derailing mechanism is further caused by the fact that many of the support requests take typically only a couple of hours to be completed. However, many options to increase such support require the hiring of a part-time to full time equivalent. In means that variations in demand can create bigger variations in need for supply. In operation management, we call this the Bullwhip Effect and it can have highly damaging consequences on such work organization.
One of the very fundamental reasons why such peaks occur is the extreme dependency of legal support on human intervention.
As the delay becomes longer and longer, the impact on each aspect of the activity: meetings not validly held or postponed, contracts not signed or without proper legal checkup, etc.
The company is therefore at risk of losing money, momentum or opportunities due to the insufficient processing capacity of its legal support team.
There are two aspects to the solution that can be proposed.
One is of course, using external legal support. By doing so, a company will shift the problem outside of its perimeter. That is a very valid answer to the problem. This assistance can be provided by law firms or interim legal managers. However, if the other party is as reliant on human work time as the company is, then either the problem remains the same, the quality decreases, or the cost becomes higher, sometimes significantly.
This is why a second aspect of the solution is needed: efficiency.
The external party will have to demonstrate a much higher efficiency in handling legal support requests. With such asset, the legal outsourcing provider can deliver the same or even a higher value to the company’s operations with a steady and solid quality-price ratio.
This part of the solution is found with legal outsourcing providers.
In this document, we have presented the steps and benefits of outsourcing your business processes to a third-party provider. We have shown how to identify your core and non-core functions, analyze the costs and risks, and select the best supplier for your needs. We have also provided some tips and best practices for managing the outsourcing relationship and ensuring quality and compliance.
Outsourcing can be a strategic and competitive advantage for your business, if done right. It can help you reduce costs, improve efficiency, focus on your core competencies, and accessing specialized skills and technologies.. However, it also requires careful planning, selection, and monitoring of the supplier, as well as clear communication and alignment of expectations and goals. We hope that this document has given you a comprehensive overview of the outsourcing process and how to make outsourcing work for you.
If you feel that contract reviewing is an area for improvement in your business, let's talk and see how your process and overall approach can become more efficient.
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