How to Optimize the Distribution of Legal Work?
At LawyerlinQ, we engage with the largest legal departments in the Netherlands regarding their legal challenges.
In this article, we discuss how to optimally distribute legal tasks. There are various ways to distribute legal work within your own team and beyond.
Team activities
How do you assist legal teams in achieving a balance between engaging, varied and challenging work, and optimal support for the business?
Firstly, assess your team's expertise and discuss which tasks provide the most energy. Many organizations either lack this insight or have limited visibility into it.
As a legal manager, you benefit from maximizing your team's efficiency. Additionally, employee satisfaction and retention within your team often serve as good indicators of your team's success.
To influence this, it helps to align the majority of your team members' tasks with their specific expertise or individual development.
Moreover, this enhances the quality and speed of advice provided to the business, thereby increasing your team's reliability within the organization.
Outsourcing
Other projects still need to be completed to avoid unnecessary (commercial) risks.
These tasks can be distributed within your team, across your organization, or, if there is a lack of capacity and/or expertise, outsourced to an independent lawyer or law firm.
The same applies to specific ad hoc tasks for which your team members currently lack time or require specialist knowledge.
When outsourcing work, legal departments often first look within their own network for an independent lawyer who can handle it. Alternatively, they engage a well-known law firm.
Optimal Distribution
If you know that your team cannot handle certain tasks, you want to fulfill them in the best possible way.
This can be achieved by organizing a flexible pool of lawyers from your network, well-known law firms supplemented with independent lawyers, and law firms from the market.
This way, you can find the best lawyer for each project at the best price, who may not need extensive training because there is already experience with your organization and/or sector.
Moreover, this ensures that your team can continue to focus on work aligned with their expertise.
Want to learn more about how to optimally distribute legal work? We are happy to assist further.
