Need
A large multinational pharmaceuticals business with an established legal team required immediate support to cover the period of time between legal team members leaving the business and replacements being recruited. The staff leaving were senior lawyers and so the team also needed support to supervise and mentor a number of juniors in the team during the period.
Our Solution
IHLS provided an urgent onboarding process to understand the business, how the team currently worked, and the support required, and created a high level playbook for the negotiation of commercial contracts which enabled IHLS to begin providing support immediately. IHLS provided support made up of a senior and associate in-house solicitor on an on demand basis to manage legal work assigned to IHLS, who were able to use the wider team of IHLS lawyers to process legal work to ensure both speed or turnaround and cost efficiency, whilst always delivering a fully quality controlled product with minimum input from the legal team where possible. The two lawyers also attended the client’s offices two days a week to provide on site support and to assist with supervision of the junior lawyers, which also continued remotely on other days.
The team were also able to work with the legal team to identify optimisation opportunities such as such as self-serve documents and tools for the business, house templates to reduce negotiation and speed up contracting, and legal design to explain their contractual terms in a simple and efficient manner to non-legal counterparties.
Benefit
IHLS was able to get up to speed quickly and begin providing full support to the legal team in very short period of time from the initial instruction, which allowed the client to manage the existing and new workflow without a drop in service levels to the businesses. The optimisation work increased efficiency by reducing requests for legal assistance in the areas where self-serve was introduced by around 50%, and reduced time to agree terms with counterparties using the new house templates.