LBC Wise Counsel aims to give insightful support for in-house lawyers, in a way that is best for them.

We’ll get to know you, your business and challenges; we’ll be as efficient as we can without being disruptive or intrusive.  You need to move on so we’ll do all we can to give you the reassurance that you can make decisions quickly and confidently.

We have worked with general counsel at organisations of all sizes, in many sectors, all around the world. While every team is different many of their challenges follow similar themes – demonstrating the effectiveness of their teams, managing more with less, looking for process improvement, team development, managing demand, reporting value, and so on.

Our focus is helping in-house lawyers to be the best that they can be.  While our consulting services are individually shaped to the requirements of each engagement, we find that our work typically falls into four significant areas of activity:

• Organisational development – helping the team operate the optimal structure to meet current and future demands
• Operational effectiveness – shaping and developing policies and processes to support current and future demands
• Strategic direction – the role the team plays in the organisation, its alignment and the value it brings
• External adviser review – assisting the team to build successful valuable relationships with external legal and other advisers

Organisational development 

We help legal teams identify the contribution they can make for the organisations they support and the way they should organise themselves to achieve this contribution. We can assess the current operational effectiveness to highlight areas of strength and areas for development using our survey and activity analysis tools plus comparative data from previous projects.

We also help teams look at their resource management, the management of work-in-progress and the means by which teams express value to the rest of the organisation. We assist teams to review their budgets and their formal internal processes for knowledge management, document retention and outsourcing work.

Operational effectiveness

Operational effectiveness is achieved when expectations are well set, managed and achieved. This is very different from simply trying to please people in a relentless demand hungry environment. We have a range of techniques including feedback surveys to gain an independent insight into the team’s perceived effectiveness.  However our surveys also reveal significantly how a team can set appropriate and realistic expectations and in so doing redefine its role and the value it adds.

Strategic direction

Making time to develop strategic plans can be difficult when the day job always seems to be in the way. LBC Wise Counsel can you help accelerate planning and development in this area and use its experience to bring best practice approaches to a range of activities including the following:-

• The appraisal process and personal development plans
• Training plans and competency frameworks
• Customer satisfaction surveys
• Use of technology across the team’s activity
• Document retention policies
• Knowledge management
• Work in progress and analysis of work areas handled
• Resource planning
• Recruitment, succession planning and organisational design

External adviser review

We can assist teams develop successful, mutual gains, relationships with their external legal and other advisers.

We have significant experience of helping in-house teams review their relationships with law firms and other external advisers in the UK and internationally. Our experience includes helping teams define and implement a strategy for the use of law firms and external advisers, reviewing the processes for appointment and ongoing relationship management, for articulating value and for establishing genuine and useful “value add”.

To discuss how we can help you please call Paul Gilbert +44 (0) 7867 798 363 or email pg@lbcwiscounsel.com