Now, more than ever, business leaders and in-house counsel need access to fairly priced, business focused legal advice. Whether your business is growing fast or operating in a rapidly changing environment, which so many of us currently are, you need advice from lawyers who know your business well and who are able to move swiftly to avert or manage a problem before it consumes your headspace.
Our commercial team’s HCR Flex offering is designed to supplement or complement your in-house counsel team, or to use as an alternative to in-house counsel. This alternative method of packaging our legal services for you moves away from project by project, ‘hourly rates’ advice, and gives you access to the commercial legal expertise you need when you need it, as well as allowing you to control your costs. It is flexible legal support that meets your needs now and as they change.
Our commercial team lawyers cover the range of business-to-business and business-to-consumer supply chain contracts’ related work (e.g. contracts for the supply of services, supply of goods, manufacturing, distribution, agency, franchising, consultancy). The team also has lawyers who, in addition to this general contracts-related work, specialise in intellectual property advisory and licensing matters, IT and technology contracts, and data protection and privacy. Lawyers spanning all of these areas of expertise can be available to support you under the HCR Flex model.
Our HCR Flex options have been designed in response to the way clients use us, and increasingly prefer to use us. Some options include:
- A retained service – providing the ad hoc advice you need, whenever you need it for a fixed cost at a discounted rate. Typically, this is suitable for those needing less than seven hours’ advice each month who want to be able to pick up the phone with a question and not feel that the clock starts ticking the moment they do
- Onsite secondment – onsite support from a dedicated solicitor directly to your team for one or more day each month, including the provision of training to upskill your people, again with discounted rates and provided by people who know your business
- Virtual secondment – as the onsite secondment, but our service is provided remotely which means it is not affected by travel or other restrictions, or subject to travel expenses (this option is, of course, proving popular and has been demonstrated to work well, during pandemic related restrictions)
- Mixed secondment – a secondment by more than one solicitor who can alternate as you need us, providing you with ‘in-house counsel’ resource across different legal specialisms at a fraction of the traditional cost. You’ll retain your single point of contact but can flex the type of expertise you need from within our commercial team of solicitors
- Interim secondment – onsite or virtual legal advice for the periods when your regular resource is not available or enough, be that because of holiday, parental leave, sickness, resignations or special projects which demand more capacity than your in-house team are able to provide.
We have provided HCR Flex and secondment services to clients in a range of sectors, including technology, retail, recruitment and life sciences. We can provide this ‘in-house’ counsel resource for everything from a fast-growing technology company which needs a single lawyer to implement a legal project over a fixed period of time, through to a large multi-national that requires additional in-house resource in its established legal team where there are temporary resource gaps or periods of absence to cover.
Please contact Nathan Evans, HCR partner in our commercial lawyers team, if you would like to have an initial conversation about HCR Flex and explore the options, on 01223 667 336 or at [email protected].
