Legal Management Consulting
Allygroup is Australia’s leading legal management consultancy.
Rising legal costs are a major concern for both businesses and government agencies, with spiralling legal costs a significant issue. Many organisations feel powerless when trying to impose controls and accountability on their external legal service providers.
However, you can control your legal spend. Our suite of tools and techniques can help you improve and maximise value in both the procurement and delivery of legal services.
How we can help you
We are lawyers who have worked in both private practice and in house. We understand exactly how law firms operate and the challenges faced by in house lawyers.
We regularly conduct reviews for large organisations of their legal services procurement and management and the efficiency of in house legal departments .
We can work with you to understand:
What are your legal service needs
How to maximise savings
How to deliver greater value from your legal spend.
Our services include:
Stakeholder engagement
We work with your stakeholders to understand your legal needs and key objectives, and to build a framework that will enable you to obtain maximum value from your legal spend.
Legal cost analysis and management
We can provide you with the tools to work out exactly what your legal spend should be, as well as give you the tools to help your external legal service providers manage their budget.
In house legal team efficiency reviews
We can help you to optimise efficiencies from your in house legal teams. Often, legal teams develop organically and what used to work may not reflect current best practices.
We can:
Advise you on how to maximise the value of your in house team
Ensure that the right mix of resources are available to your clients
Undertake stakeholder interviews to get unbiased, third party feedback on your current team and structure
Advise on any changes that may be required to optimise efficiency
Design a new model for your existing services, or design a greenfield model,
Provide change management services as the new model is embedded
Provide continuous improvement services such as client surveys and 360 feedback surveys post-implementation.
Establishing legal panels
The purpose of a legal panel is to create competition between legal service providers, as well as to deliver value for money.
We can advise you on how to:
Identify the procurement arrangement that will maximise value for your business or government agency
Recommend the most appropriate number and type of legal providers on your legal panel
Specify alternative fee arrangements
Establish appropriate service level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs)
Conduct the approach to market (such as drafting the request for tender documentation, the industry briefing, and responding to clarifications and questions)
Conduct the tender evaluation (such as developing the evaluation methodology and plan, training the evaluation team, overseeing the bid opening, conducting the evaluation process and preparing the evaluation report)
Oversee the contract approval, any negotiations and signature, implementation and training.
In this way, we will ensure that you put together the best possible panel of advisors to meet the legal needs of your business or government agency.
Managing legal panels
Many businesses and government agencies spend time and money on setting up legal panels.
However, few take the next step, which involves:
Managing those panels to ensure that the panel firms comply with SLAs and KPIs
Monitoring performance to ensure that legal service providers are complying with their contractual obligations
Benchmarking the performance of legal service providers against recognised benchmarking models in order to ensure that competitive tension is maintained
Defining internal governance arrangements, including separating procurement from matter management in order to improve the quality and value delivered by your external legal service providers.
By using the above techniques, we can help you manage your legal panels to ensure you obtain your desired outcomes as cost-effectively as possible.
Auditing law firm invoices
Instances of over-servicing or unnecessary costs being charged by law firms to clients are all too common. Poor billing practices can be missed by internal legal teams who may lack the resources to conduct detailed reviews of their legal providers’ invoices.
We can work with you to critically review your providers’ invoices, either against existing service levels, or we can develop billing standards to inform the invoice reviews. Our specialist resources for reviewing invoices have enabled Allygroup to identify significant savings for our clients.
Legal project management
At Allygroup, we‘ve developed our own methodology for legal project management that is specifically tailored to large-scale litigation and major transactions and can obtain huge cost savings for our clients.
If you would like to find out more about our legal management consulting services, please call us on +61 2 5104 3170, or email us on info@allygroup.com.au.