Professional Services Special Interest Group
10th July 2012
The cross over between lawyers & consultants - how best to work together to get the optimum outcome for the client?
The objective of the meeting was to provide greater awareness of the respective value that can be delivered by lawyers and consultants on outsourcing engagements, and how this can be best utilised in future client engagements.
Marcel Horst, Excelsource, introduced this session with some thoughts on why and how lawyers and consultants could improve their work together. Client needs and trends were identified along with suggestions on how to improve engagement without compromising impartiality.
To aid discussion, Marcel suggested the attendees begin by looking at definitions of the two roles to discuss cross-over and the complexity between both roles and subsequent responsibilities.
Definitions
Consultants: Provide expert subject matter expertise, influences but have no direct authority to implement change, on a temporary basis offer more than what can be done in house.
Lawyers: Clarify rules of governance, licensed, protect the client’s interests, clarify and document all terms of the customer – supplier transaction, seek a best outcome to minimise risks and costs.
Protecting the client was iterated as one of the lawyer’s key roles and could be used in future role definitions.
Client Needs
The group then looked at the relationships between lawyers and consultants from the perspective of the client’s needs.
Paul O’Hare (legal director of the NOA, and partner at Kemp Little): “Relationship problems between lawyers and consultants can occur due to areas of overlap. It is important that activities are clear and transparent before any collaborative work.”
From a lawyer
- Turn a proposed transaction into a clear set of terms
- Help to negotiate the best outcome for the client
- Reduce client business risks by way of contract
- Bring together different company needs into one contract - commercial, operational, HR, and legal
- Clarify scope of retained and supplier deliverables - When the legal or consulting work involves outsourcing, the work retained by the client and the work to be delivered by the supplier needs to be clear or clarified (not clarity) This can sometimes be a challenge
- Comfort and a second opinion
- Independent perspective
From a consultant
- Subject matter expertise not available internally
- Broader industry perspective and benchmarks
- Past experience of services under consideration
- Speed of delivery and effecting change
- Independent perspective
- Temporary resource
Dominic Drydon, Olswang, agreed: “Chemistry is vital in lawyer / consultant relationships. Sometimes consultants have preconceived ideas about who should be doing what. Clarity on roles and responsibilities are vital and a client should take the lead on this. Standardisation between all three parties is equally important and can eradicate any confusion.”
Challenges and Trends
Marcel Horst provided a list of challenges and trends which led to a discussion about how the collaboration could be improved.
- Standardisation and Commoditisation
- Globalisation
- Flexibility
- Agility
- Cost pressure
- Changes in Legal Services Act liberalising the market creating competition
- KPO
- Divide and conquer
- Engagement is often mis-timed
- Improve definition
- Clarify roles and responsibilities
- Focus on business objectives
- Perception (hidden) costs
- Contracts vs. schedules
Mark Taylor said: “Schedules vs. contracts seems to be a common problem especially for documents which are in play internally and externally. The client should be made aware early on in the process that sometimes the schedules which are received are not detailed enough to work along with the terms and conditions.”
Paul O’Hare commented that business stakeholders should have a voice in the selection and choices of legal counsel. Mark Taylor agreed: “The chemistry with internal stakeholders is vital. Stakeholders need to be on board from the word go.”
From the discussion the following practical steps (how lawyers and consultants can work better together) were highlighted:
- Get the chemistry right early on
- Define the rules of engagement
- Seek to reduce the likelihood of not sharing information such as commercial detail between consultant and lawyer
- Analyse the opportunity
- Seek to reduce any barriers to communication within the client organisation
- Earlier engagement
- Assess key drivers and agree lead
- Share knowledge
- Packaging of advisory solutions
- Try it out
- Create a guide of how to create schedules
Paul O’Hare concluded: “Is there a risk that we are being too traditional in our roles? Could someone bring in a more integrated package that bridges the gap between lawyers and consultants? With the liberalisation of the legal market as a result of the introduction of the Legal Services Act, and other structural changes in the legal market, the emergence of organisations that can offer both legal and consultancy services as an integrated package is an increasing possibility.”
Adrian Quayle, NOA Board Member, said: “I think a good practical step from this forum is to try and look at roles and definitions in the services consultants and lawyers perform. Using a life-cycle as a guide to identity leads could be a possible way which these responsibilities can be identified.”
The full set of slides from this event can be found here.
