Business Processes

Find out how to protect your business from the risks of contractual, compliance, process, and competition law failings
Managing Legal Risk

How an experienced part‑time Legal Director can help you protect your business from process and legal risk

Today’s business is an empowered business. Rather than having all decision-making centralised at the top of the organisation, decision-making is distributed throughout the business.

It’s fast and efficient, to be sure—and also empowering, in terms of employee engagement. But it also exposes the business to a significant number of process and legal risks, thereby raising a number of serious questions for business leaders.

That’s where one of our part‑time Legal Directors can help you, by identifying and working to eliminate these process and legal risks. With one of our part‑time Legal Directors working as part of your business, you’ll not only have highly experienced commercial lawyer on hand whenever you need them, but also continuity. A familiar face, operating as part of your team, helping your business with process and legal risks going forward.

Below we summarise some of the ways in which we help you to identify and eliminate these process and legal risks.

 

It’s not difficult to think of ways in which a business can encounter process and legal risks.

Do you know who your company is contracting with, for example? Are procedures in place to vet potential trading partners in terms of credit risk, their trading reputation, and how they operate—in order to avoid a breach of anti-slavery or bribery laws?

With employees regularly entering into both written and unwritten contracts with third parties, is there visibility into the terms that are being accepted—for example when purchase orders refer to a third party’s standard terms and conditions? Such contracts can easily turn out to be unfavourable in relation to their duration, price, and other restrictions.

And do employees know what they should and shouldn’t be signing? Are contracts re-tendered regularly, and in accordance with established rules to ensure best price, and good practice? Are employees—and directors—aware of what they can and cannot say, in order to avoid breaching competition rules?

Such questions aren’t just academic. They cut right to the heart of how your business operates, and the risks to which it is exposed.

When we first engage with a client on process and legal risk mitigation, our first step is to gain an understanding of how the business operates, and how you currently do business.

We review existing contractual commitments—both written and oral—and implement standard terms and conditions, training employees so that they know which clauses cannot be amended without referral. We’ll dovetail insurance policies where possible, so that risk is always covered by a suitable insurance policy. And we’ll minimise directors’ risks by putting in place a robust Directors and Officers liability insurance policy.

We’ll make sure that the right frameworks are in place so as to minimise process and legal risks going forward. Ensuring that there are rules in place for tendering, for example, and putting in place checklists for new suppliers, and ‘know your customer’ procedures.

We’ll also implement a contracts database so that legal rights—the right to end a contract, for instance, or implement a price increase—are not overlooked. And we’ll diarise the renewals of intellectual property registrations and licences, and help you to keep such registers up to date.

Such things aren’t complicated, but they are often overlooked. Which is where process and legal risks can arise, as informal systems and procedures prove inadequate or inconsistent.

The advice you receive from us, certainly in legal terms, we would expect to be much the same as that from a traditional law firm. However, two things in particular make The Legal Director stand apart.

Firstly, we give legal advice from a business perspective. All of our lawyers are highly experienced in business, all of us have worked in industry, and all of us are well-versed in how businesses work in practice.

None of our part-time Legal Directors is the equivalent of the junior lawyer that a legal firm might assign to your case—and yet despite this, our fees are in most cases lower. In all instances, our approach is to provide you with a Legal Director—a familiar face around the table, offering legal advice from a solidly business-friendly perspective.

Secondly, The Legal Director is proactive rather than reactive. Our approach to process and legal risk is to proactively put in place the appropriate legal protections, compliance mechanisms, and suitable contractual terms before problems arise. Rather than helping you to deal with process and legal risk problems after they have occurred—which is too late—we strive to anticipate potential problems and put in place protective mechanisms ahead of time.

  1. We will work with you to make sure that both the written and unwritten contractual terms and conditions to which your business is a party are fair, reasonable, and reflect your best interests.
  2. We will work with you to make sure that your tendering procedures follow best practice, including supplier vetting processes, and don’t expose you to hidden compliance risks in terms of anti-slavery or bribery legislation.
  3. We will work with you to make sure that key obligations and opportunities in terms of intellectual property rights or the variation of contractual terms are not missed, exposing your business to lost income or risk to important assets.
Would you like to explore this opportunity?

Call us on 020 3056 8538