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GLS External Counsel Management™
Efficient management of your external counsel
The Problem
You have had to appoint external counsel and now you have to manage them to get the result you need without costs spiralling out of control. But, you already have a day job!
Related challenges include:
- poor client briefings/instructions to law firms are a major cause of matter inefficiency, “mandate creep” and price inflation
- if you do not effectively manage legal counsel it is difficult for them to deliver what you need
- understanding the legal mumbo jumbo is not easy and that impacts your ability to respond
- translating technical legal advice (written with the law firms PI policy in mind) is a challenge
- the financial model of law firms generally works best with inexperienced clients
Wouldn’t it be good if someone with experience of both instructing law firms and being the instructed law firm step in with an exclusive mandate to make things run efficiently?
The GLS Solution
GLS External Counsel Management™ pro-actively and efficiently manages the interface between your business and your external counsel in order to massively reduce costs and free up your capacity.
GLS External Counsel Management™ efficiently helps you extract the external expertise required from your advisors in a way that supports high-quality and timely business decisions.
GLS External Counsel Management™ gets you a better, faster and cheaper result and makes your relationship with external counsel more strategic – you get more quality, practical and valuable advice and less of what is not.
GLS External Counsel Management™ ensures that if your in-house team lacks expertise or capacity in relation to the law in question, the transaction type or jurisdiction, your matter will not be adversely impacted.
GLS External Counsel Management™ routinely removes at least 40% of typical external advisor costs (even after our costs are factored in) from any significant mandate, whilst massively reducing your internal time cost.
Problem solved.
Solution Deliverables
Deliverables
| Single Contact Point: | Your GLS ECM™ advisor will handle all aspects of external counsel management from the daily interaction through to the delivery of the below service features. |
| Minimise Business Interruption: | We effectively manage all aspects of the engagement for you including working with you to reach out for data/instructions from within your ecosystem. |
| Pro-active Counsel Management: | We proactively manage the on-time and on-budget arrival of all external counsel deliverables. |
| Value Transfer: | We will identify and ensure that relevant projects are completed in a manner that creates recurring value to the client (including IP harvest and group wide usage, etc). |
| Project Planning: | The GLS Group paved the way for the removal of 80% of costs from legal assignments – we can make sure that you counsel's project plan is optimal for your business and the project. |
| Scope Monitoring: | We ensure that counsel do not go out of scope without justifying why and having first complied with associated protocols. |
| Client Dependency Management: | Most projects require certain client dependencies – we ensure that they are understood and are delivered in a timely fashion. |
| Billing Review: | We ensure that billing data is accurate, complete and transparent, so the work performed is in scope and that assumption triggering events have been notified. |
| Group Legal Compliance: | We ensure that external counsel act in accordance with any group legal policy/compliance requirements you have, and if you don’t have one, we will apply our best-practice standards. |
| Counsel selection: | We qualitatively assess who is the best possibly external advisor for your project with total value transfer in mind. Critically, we keep you safe from “mess for less”. |
| Knowledge Harvest: | Where possible, we convert counsel deliverables into IP Assets that can then be used for your wider business going forward so that enduring value is achieved. |
| Resourcing Efficiency: | We make sure that counsel is not undertaking work that could easily and sensibly be done in-house more efficiently. |
| Outcome Testing: | We make sure that the advice that is received from counsel is capable of use – i.e. that it is delivered so that a high-quality business decision can emerge. |
| Qualitative Instructions: | We will help you prepare high quality instructions which will allow your legal counsel to act efficiently. We will attend to any iterative instructions to ensure project momentum continues. |
Project Requirements
Please click Request Follow-Up if you would like to discuss a bespoke project so that we can contact you to discuss your requirements.
Solution SLA Options and US$ Pricing
| Column one | Column two | Column three | Column four | Column five |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Engagement Options | Hours Included | Hourly Rate Equivalent | ||
| Day Rate | 10 hours | $299/hr | ||
| Weekly Rate | 50 hours | $269/hr | ||
| Monthly Rate | 200 hours | $199/hr |
GLS RPLV Legal Operations Score
This solution’s GLS RPLV impact score:
| Resource Status: | Specialist | Repeater | Formative |
| Ease of Implementation: | Complex | Average | Easy |
| Value Demonstration/Visibility: | Low | Medium | High |
| Productivity Leverage Profile: | Low | Medium | High |
| IHL Line Optimisation: | Single | Multiple | All Lines |
IHL Critical Function Optimisation Targets
This solution enhances performance across the following critical in-house functions:
In-House Legal: Critical Functions / Processes
Human Capital
Legal Operations
Service Provider
Performance
GLS has identified 15 critical in-house processes/functions that are present in every world-class legal department. To learn what these functions are, their composition and how they interrelate to deliver efficient legal team performance outcomes - visit here.
