Value is about creating a constant sense of understanding, alignment, delivery, proactivity and, crucially, trust with multiple stakeholders. If all are aligned corporate value will be created over time.

The most effective leaders proactively manage their stakeholder group and recognise their individual priorities, with both economic and emotional measures of value. Effective leaders use this understanding to shape their team’s priorities, actions and communications in order to deliver optimum value.

How can the Client Development Centre (CDC) help?

Legal needs analysis

No standard, widely accepted process exists for undertaking legal needs analysis and very few general counsel (GC) have systematically mapped their organisation's key business drivers to the primary activities of their legal function. Working alongside members of the in-house legal team we apply legal heatmaps and best practice approaches to key stakeholder engagement to ensure clear alignment of the function with the commercial interests of the organisation.

Spend analytics

In a recent survey, 72 per cent of respondents* reported increased pressure on their legal departments to become even more efficient and to better manage legal spend. This is the reality of the ‘more for less’ challenge faced by many in-house teams. We provide legal spend analytic and diagnostic capability that enables the legal team to make evidence-based decisions on resource and total legal spend. The outcomes include enhanced insight into the efficiency, productivity and effectiveness of the existing external/internal resource mix.
*Source: Consero

Legal process mapping

Mapping legal processes enables corporate legal departments to build a consistent and efficient service delivery model. Through effective process analysis in-house teams achieve certainty with flexibility, better quality control and enhanced risk management. Using proven techniques we help to identify the most cost-efficient way to deliver required outcomes.

Legal risk management

A crucial part of legal needs analysis is identifying and quantifying legal risks, as an important sub-category of operational risk. We work alongside corporate legal teams to help them to identify and categorise risks in their organisation. Based on our experience of helping clients, we advise on the design and build of frameworks which ensure effective legal risk management while clearly defining responsibility between the in-house legal and operational teams.

Strategy

Many in-house legal departments do not have well-articulated strategies and GCs often report they have little time to stop and plan. We recognise that while the challenges and goals of in-house teams can be similar, the strategy each team adopts is always unique; being organisation and context specific. We have deep expertise helping GCs and heads of legal in some of the world's largest in-house teams to develop and implement strategy.