In-house legal setup and audit
We will count the legal work your company actually produces, name who handles each kind of it today, and hand you the order to build the rest in — before anybody is hired.
When you need a legal function audit
Legal work has no owner
It gets done by whoever is free, which means differently each time. Nobody is accountable for it, and nobody can say how much of it there is.
Advice arrives after the decision
The deal is agreed, then the lawyer is asked. At that point the only available advice is about damage, and the expensive part has already happened.
Contracts are signed in three places
Sales sends one version, the product team another, and a third sits in a founder’s inbox. Nobody holds the list of what the company has promised.
Nobody knows what the template covers
A document is reused because it was used before. Where its limits are, and who may change it, are questions with no written answer.
You are about to hire a lawyer
Designing the role after the person arrives costs twice: once in the wrong hire, and again in the year it takes to notice.
Your lawyer reports to the deal owner
The person who needs the answer to be yes also decides the lawyer’s objectives. That is a structural problem, and no amount of good faith fixes it.
What a legal function audit covers
A legal function is five things: the work the company produces, the people who handle it, the documents they reuse, the calendar of dates that carry consequences, and the decisions somebody is allowed to take alone. A company that signs contracts and answers questions already has all five. What tends to be missing is having them written down together, which is why the honest first question is not what to build but what exists.
Two structural points shape the design, and both come from how the profession describes itself. The first is independence: a lawyer is to exercise independent, unbiased professional judgment in advising a client, acting free from direction, control or interference. Inside a company that stops being an abstraction, because the lawyer’s objectives, pay and reporting line are set by the business they are advising.
The second is protection. Whether what your own lawyer writes stays confidential is answered locally: some systems permit employing a lawyer admitted to the profession, and others do not permit in-house counsel at all. The rules on when a client may waive confidentiality differ as well. These are principles put forward as a basis for the codes that professional authorities write, so what binds you is the rule where the question is asked. It is worth knowing which answer applies before a sensitive memo is written rather than once it has been requested.
What we read first
- A month of real legal output: contracts sent and received, questions asked, filings made.
- Every template in circulation, and the version people are actually using.
- Who signed what, under what authority, and whether that authority is written anywhere.
- The dates that carry a consequence, and who is watching each of them.
- What has gone wrong before, and what was changed afterwards.
Where the work goes missing
- Between a template and the case it was never meant to cover.
- Between the person who negotiates and the person who signs.
- In answers given verbally, which cannot be found by the next person to ask.
- On dates owned by everyone, which is the same as owned by nobody.
- Around the decisions nobody has been told they are allowed to make.
What you get
- A map of the legal work the company actually produces, with volumes.
- A named owner for each kind of it, including the kinds nobody claimed.
- The boundary of each template: what it safely covers, and when to stop and ask.
- A calendar with dates, owners and consequences against them.
- A build order: what to fix now, what to hire for, what to leave alone.
Sources: International Principles on Conduct for the Legal Profession (International Bar Association, 2018) — principle 1 on independence, and the commentary on confidentiality noting that jurisdictions differ on employed counsel. They are a basis for codes; they are not law in themselves.
Stages of work
A month of legal work — about a week.
We will take one ordinary month and count what it produced: contracts in and out, questions raised, approvals given, filings made, disputes touched. Volume first, because every later decision depends on how much there actually is.
Who handles it now.
Against that list we will put names, including the ones that surprise you — the operations manager who reads every contract, the founder who answers at midnight. This is the map of the function you already have.
The documents in circulation.
Every template, the version in real use, and what each one silently assumes. We will mark where a template stops being safe, because that line is what lets non-lawyers work without asking.
The calendar and its owners.
Renewals, notice periods, filing dates, reporting deadlines, the expiry of the things people forget can expire. Each gets an owner and a consequence written next to it.
Independence and protection.
Who the legal role reports to, who sets its objectives, and what happens when the answer the business wants is not the answer. Alongside it, where the work is done and what that means for whether the advice stays protected.
The design, and the order to build it.
You get one document: the inventory of what is there, the list of what is absent, the fixes that need no hire, and the parts that genuinely need a person. Where the answer is a hire, that is legal recruitment; where it is a lawyer of ours inside your team, that is legal function outstaffing.
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