Legal As A Service: What You Need From Your B2B Legal Services

A world of instant fixes

Our 21^st century lives are increasingly filled with pop-up solutions and instant fixes. We’ve become accustomed to everything from instant coffee to holiday search sites that filter through thousands of options in milliseconds. Whether it’s bundled bank accounts or one-stop accounting solutions – life is delivered to us in packages.

Sometimes, this comes to us through the cloud, or sometimes by a delivery driver clutching the ubiquitous branded cardboard box that’s now instantly recognisable worldwide.

‘'Excellent!’ we think. After all, it gives us more time to focus on the important things in life, letting us dedicate more time to achieving our ambitions and finding greater fulfilment. We can all get on board with that.

From intranet to legal

This sentiment is has never been more apt than in a competitive commercial environment.

One of the clearest examples of this in the IT world is the appearance of ‘intranet-in-a-box’ products. They shift away from a custom-build approach towards a more turnkey-focussed solution, highlighting the evolving need for flexible digital workplaces.

For any intranet product, the vital requirements are that it is flexible, easily customisable, and has a specific product definition. As well as that, it’s also useful if the pricing is transparent, regular, and predictable and that the product itself is regularly updated and maintained.

Solutions like this are designed to be used as a cloud service, perhaps integrating with your software as a service platform like Microsoft Office 365, or installed on a SharePoint server. The value comes in ensuring that accessibility and delivery are automatic and hassle-free – as all B2B services should aim to be.

Legal as a service vs. legal out the box

If you want to succeed as a business, you need to fix your focus directly on the future ahead. In the B2B technology world this is clearer than ever, with the current cloud market being valued at US $214.3 billion – and projected to grow exponentially until 2022. You’ll want to capture your market share in this lucrative yet competitive landscape.

As Microsoft Partner specialists, we’ve seen the real-time bottom line impact of not having the right business solutions in place. This comes in many forms:

• A company suffering financially due to an unforeseen delay in their custom intranet going live.
• Enterprises struggling to negotiate a sale price due to their built-in business templates being so generic that they’re effectively useless.

The best of both worlds

There are pros and cons to both the ready-made and custom-built routes. So, it’s vital to achieve a balance between the benefits of both custom and packaged product.

This isn’t just the case in technology. In fact, the principle can be applied to the legal world as well. While some companies offer generic templates for contract documents, and a fixed amount of legal consultation per month, several questions remain for the more ambitious and discerning customer. Let’s have a look at some of these questions:

• Do we have a dedicated legal contact?
• Can I call on them for matters large and small?
• When are they available?
• Can I ask them to sit in on calls with us?
• How can we ensure our more unique client requirements are covered?
• Does my legal framework support our growth strategy?
• Does my legal process streamline service provisions and client interactions to quickly sign contracts?
• Would a potential buyer be impressed with the accuracy of our contracts?

And once you’ve taken all that into account, you need to remember that a legal expert is not necessarily an expert in the specific demands of your sector. The challenge, therefore, is to combine the best of both worlds – disrupting with both convenience and industry expertise at the same time.

The Law 365 approach

At Law 365, we achieved this by simply stating that we understand how a Microsoft Partner business works. We know your marketplace. We know what your clients will be looking for. We can anticipate what support you will need from us, and when, at each stage of your development, to increase your growth and protect you from risk.

To all of the questions we just posed, we propose a new solution. That involves combining the benefits of a more convenient ‘legal-in-a-box’ approach with the expertise and speciality of tailored legal service. We call it the bespoke-in-a-box approach, combining legal as a service with convenience and practicality. That looks a little bit like this:

Pay as you go

We encourage our clients to try our services before committing to a long-term contract. For that reason, we offer a range of pay as you go options, allowing you flexible service for one or more pieces of self-contained work.

Subscription

We also offer monthly subscriptions that give you access to 3, 4 or 5 pieces of work, for a fixed fee, with specialist advice included. Each individual piece of work can entitle to you to several hours’ worth of advice, depending on the context.

Template

If you are well-established, and you know exactly which documents you need, we can provide you with non-specific templates, across three main areas: win and deliver, hiring and firing, website and app. If you like, this is your more ‘legal-in-a-box’ variety of service.

But with Law365, it’s not just about the ease of subscription and the flexibility of the services – important as those factors might be. The value lies in the quality of the advice we can offer you as specialists within the Microsoft technology world. That’s where the service part of legal as a service comes in – it’s not a one-time transactional relationship. We take a partner-focused approach, so a retainer contract with us is as close as possible to have your own specialist in-house counsel, on hand whenever you need us.

Booking our time in advance enables us to be there for you when you need it the most. You’ll have the peace of mind of knowing you can rely on dedicated personal support. And, as any of our clients will attest, we’re a pretty friendly and lively bunch to work with. A far cry from the stuffy, jargon-wielding stereotype of lawyers.

If you want to find out more, we’re more than happy to schedule a call or have a chat about your current vision, and your future requirements, with a view to seeing how we can help.

And if you need any more proof that a decent legal partner can make all the difference – look no further than the six of our clients who have since gone on to win Microsoft Business of the Year Awards after working with us. They certainly pulled that out of the box.

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