December 4, 2019
Legal processes are a vital part of daily life for almost every business. Whether that’s creating privacy policies, contracts, due diligence investigations, or litigation – absolutely everyone has to do it. And at some point, most of those companies will have to decide whether to hire in-house legal staff or take advantage of outsourced legal services. Of course, there are pros and cons to both approaches, but today many businesses are finding that the benefits of outsourcing vastly outweigh the consequences. In this blog, we discuss some of the main reasons for this.
1. Cost savings
For most companies who consider outsourced legal services, there’s one significant benefit that drives their decision: cost. It’s difficult to justify investing in the time and cost of in-house legal staff. For many companies, particularly SMBs, there simply isn’t enough legal related work to justify a full-time role. And once you’ve factored in the time it would take to train up an in-house employee, many rightly conclude that there’s a better way.
With outsourced legal services, you can reap the benefits of lower costs by only paying for the services you need. As well as this, with the right legal services firm, you can achieve even greater cost savings by scaling your investment up or down as your needs fluctuate.
2. A breadth of expertise
In external law firms, you’ll often have access to a much deeper pool of expertise and talent than when you recruit employees. External firm are usually dedicated to a particular type of service, which is often offered to a range of clients. By focusing on one area of expertise, you’ll regularly find that outsourced workers are experts in their industry, with plenty of experience dealing with accounts and situations like yours.
A new employee will have to learn the ins and outs of your business and industry as part of their onboarding process. But with an external firm, this can be completed fast, efficiently and effectively since they already understand your market inside and out and what the industry is generally doing.
3. Focus on what you’re good at
In any business, you have to weigh up how skillsets are distributed across the company. Companies prosper when they find a niche that they can focus on and become specialists. When employing in-house workers, you must weigh up whether to expand your existing in-house skillset or find new skills to add.
There are pros and cons to both. But, for B2B companies in particular, it’s often better to concentrate your in-house skillset around what you do best. That means new employees can make an active contribution to improving the value of the services or products you offer. By using outsourced legal services, you can reserve in-house talent for when it can add value to the core aspects of your business.
4. Keep your business nimble
There are many advantages to keeping your employee headcount down – apart from the obvious cost benefits. Smaller companies are usually more nimble and adaptive – able to react to changes in the market with greater agility than their larger counterparts. And with developments in technology, smaller businesses can achieve more success today than ever – by targeting new customers and markets all around the world.
It’s never been a better time to be a small business, and many now favour a model of fewer employees with more agile and focused expertise. By outsourcing law services to professional legal experts, you get the best of both worlds.
Find your niche with outsourced legal services
For companies considering whether to take advantage of outsourced legal services, there’s often only one main concern. The main benefit of in-house employees is that they are specialists on your products and services, dedicating all their time to a specific account. Many law firms will accept clients from a whole range of different industries. That means while their law experience might be top notch, their understanding of your specific business situation might be less developed than you’d get with an in-house employee.
However, there is another way. Law firms like Law 365 combine top-rate law expertise with a focused, exclusive client base. For us, that means working exclusively with Microsoft Partners – so we can build up an unrivalled speciality into delivering law services for B2B technology partners.
This allows us to combine our intimate knowledge of our clients’ business situation, together with the unrivalled law expertise and cost savings that outsourced legal services offer. But don’t just believe us – take it from one of our satisfied clients:
“Our experience working with Law365 so far has been really good. As a business, we’ve been winning larger contracts, worth millions a year, and having a legal counsel that knows your offerings is really beneficial.” – Nigel Redwood from Nasstar