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Launched in 2016, The Plum Guide is a vacation platform that handpicks the world’s best homes (the top 1%) for vacation rentals and short-term lets. It’s like the Michelin Guide — but for homes.
The company takes a systematic, personal and meticulous approach to testing every single property. It accepts just 1 in 100 homes and shares detailed, balanced reviews — with real human help from multilingual staff at the end of the phone — so that guests can find the perfect city stay.
In its first three years The Plum Guide has grown at 15–20% month on month, expanded to cover six cities (London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Rome and Milan), and vetted over 100,000 homes.
The business’s global rollout strategy is backed by an all-star cast investor group and world-class venture capitalists.
The Plum Guide’s ambitious growth strategy means that it needs to quickly systematise the business to enable new cities to be added easily to its portfolio.
According to Joe Adams, The Plum Guide’s Chief Financial Officer, that strategy — and the property lettings business generally — can generate a heavy ongoing legal workload.
“One major challenge is ensuring that the business is fully up to date with the constant regulatory changes relating to property lettings,” explains Joe.
“Also, it’s critical that our terms and conditions are thorough, clear and concise so that we minimise the risk of potential disputes over issues such as property bookings, cancellations and damage. We are the middle man between the property host and the guest, so our terms need to be rigorous and clear-cut.
“Another challenge is that the role of CFO involves me in most operational aspects of the business, including finance, facilities, HR and legal — so I cannot afford to get too deeply involved in legal detail at the expense of other areas of the business.”
When Joe Adams joined The Plum Guide as Chief Financial Officer, an interim CFO was in place. “It was my predecessor who referred The Legal Director to Plum — and I was very happy to go with his recommendation based on the good things I heard.”
Joe continues: “Until then, I had not considered the option of a part-time in-house General Counsel. However, I saw what a very attractive proposition The Legal Director offered: our own in-house, high-level commercial and property legal expertise — yet available on a flexible basis.”
Convinced by The Legal Director’s flexible provision of legal advice and services, The Plum Guide enlisted lawyer Jane Webber from The Legal Director as an in- house General Counsel for one and a half days each week.
Jane, who trained at a City law firm and has extensive experience of both commercial property and commercial contract law, now handles what Joe describes as “all the day-to-day legal stuff” at Plum, as well as “larger legal projects that feed into and improve our everyday operations.”
Joe continues: “Amongst the larger projects was a complete reinvigoration of our terms and conditions. Our Customer Services team in particular are eternally grateful for Jane’s practical review of our Ts and Cs. Thanks to Jane we now have ready-made answers for most of the legal-related issues Customer Services encounter. And for new issues, they can escalate the problem to Jane immediately — and get the right answer back very quickly.”
“Having Jane as part of our team saves me a great deal of time,” says Joe. “We have a regular stream of legal work and knowing I have this safe, trusted pair of hands alongside me is very reassuring. Also, we can very easily scale the legal resource up and down if need be.”
Day-to-day legal issues that might previously have turned into legal disputes are now “knocked on the head very quickly,” he continues.
There are strategic benefits, too: “Having Jane here frees me up to focus on high-priority CFO issues such as growth and related funding. Without The Legal Director our growth rate and related fund raising would have been seriously slowed down.”
Joe concludes: “The Legal Director provides us with legal expertise in-house — on a flexible contract basis, and as part of our senior team, with all benefits of continuity, knowledge and insight that brings. Most critically for me, I have an expert legal advisor I can always go to, who looks at things from both the legal and the commercial perspective.”
The Legal Director is a fully regulated legal consultancy that provides businesses with high-calibre experienced lawyers on a part-time or flexible basis.
By working smarter as part of the client’s business, and by delivering legal advice from a business perspective, we can demonstrably save our clients significant amounts of money and directors’ time.
The Legal Director is the most transparent, cost-effective way of embedding a senior lawyer within your business — at a fraction of the cost of employing a full-time Legal Director or engaging with a traditional law firm on an ad hoc basis.
We match one of our lawyers to your business needs and he/she then performs as a member of your senior management team, just like an in-house lawyer. Moreover, clients can use our unique 9-point legal framework for business-focused legal advice to systematically address key business areas that require legal expertise and appropriate action.
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