Loyal readers of this blog will recall that I recently moved flat.
Fellow residents of London will know that we’ve had our share of rain in the last couple of weeks.
The confluence of these two events has brought me a rather unpleasant surprise.
It turns out that I have a leaky roof.
I only discovered this when I tracked down the source of a faint but steady drip.
The leak was well hidden as it was behind a wall and pooling under the floor.
It left me with the unsettling question of what would have happened if I hadn’t noticed it, or potentially worse, had ignored it.
Left unattended it would almost certainly have rotted and taken out a portion of the floor.
In the long run it would have been unpleasant, time consuming and expensive to fix.
The reality is though, that in the short term, it would have been just fine.
It wasn’t going to flood the house or create a giant sinkhole.
Like a lot of things, the status quo would have been ok… for a while.
It sometimes feels like a lot of the legal departments we talk to have leaky roofs.
They know that they’d be better off doing things another way but because the leak is manageable it’s ignored.
There are roughly 6 working weeks between now and the Christmas break.
I’d like to suggest a couple of straightforward and quick patches to your roof so you don’t have to spend 2021 searching for drips.
- Update your outside counsel guidelines to reflect best practice and what you can control and measure. For example we see lots of businesses with guidelines that insist that firms must not charge them more than the firm charges any other client. It’s a nice sentiment but impossible to enforce (by the way most law firms can’t / don’t police this). Replace these terms with more effective cost controls such as limiting what’s allowed to be billed and the use of general advice files.
- Ask your firms to report to you on what they’ve done for you over the last year and the outcomes they’ve delivered. Work types, seniority of fee earner, diversity of your teams and what amount of time was spent drafting, negotiating, on calls, etc. You can use this data to drive change if things aren’t meeting your expectations.
- Take a look at where you’re sending your work and why. You might not be ready (or need) to change your mix of firms but understanding why you’re sending particular matters to particular firms can help you drive value. Often this exercise results in straightforward changes, like shifting work from high-cost locations to lower-cost ones (often within the same firm).
Hopefully these patches to the roof shouldn’t take too long.
If you don’t have the data I’d very much encourage you to ask your firms for it.
Assuming they have a competent IT infrastructure, none of it should be time consuming to provide.
We’re also delighted to help if what you get back isn’t straight forward.
There’s 6 weeks left.
Let’s use them to set 2021 up for success.
Patched up,
Christopher Thurn
Founder – Alacrity Law
