Legal function outstaffing
A named lawyer of ours works inside your team for an agreed period. You set the tasks and supervise the work; the employment, the cover and the replacement stay with us.
When you need legal function outstaffing
There is work but no headcount
The legal load is real and the vacancy is not approved. Waiting for the budget cycle means the work still happens, just without anyone qualified on it.
Your lawyer left mid-project
Someone resigned in the middle of a matter that cannot pause. A search takes months, and the knowledge is walking out during the notice period.
Someone is on long leave
Parental or medical leave takes the only person who knows the templates. The gap has a start date, an end date, and nobody assigned to it.
A project needs a lawyer inside
A round, a migration or a launch needs legal judgment in the room every day for a few months, and then not at all.
Hiring will not finish in time
The role is agreed and the deadline is sooner than any honest search. Something has to cover the distance between those two dates.
The load is uneven by quarter
Two months of contract volume, then quiet. A permanent role sized for the peak sits idle for the rest, and one sized for the average drowns twice a year.
What legal function outstaffing gives you
Outstaffing is a named lawyer of ours working inside your team for an agreed period. You assign the tasks and supervise the work; we remain the employer, with everything that carries — the contract, the cover when they are ill, and the replacement if the fit is wrong.
The instrument that regulates employment agencies internationally names this shape explicitly: employing workers with a view to making them available to a user enterprise, which assigns their tasks and supervises how those tasks are carried out. Matching an employer with a candidate is a separate service in the same instrument, and the difference is not presentational — it decides who owes the person what.
The same standard asks states to allocate, between the supplier and the user, responsibility for the working conditions, the working time, the safety and the social protection of the person placed. That instrument reaches only the countries that have adopted it, and the rules actually governing you are the local ones. We write that allocation into the engagement in every case, because an unallocated duty is one that both sides assume the other has.
What you get
- A named lawyer, agreed before they start, whose work you have seen.
- Their time in your week: your meetings, your systems, your queue.
- Cover for illness and holiday, so the seat does not empty.
- A firm behind the person for the questions outside their depth.
- An end date that does not require a redundancy conversation.
What stays on your side
- What the person works on, in what order, and by when.
- Access to the people and the documents they need to be useful.
- Telling us early when the volume or the subject changes.
- The decisions themselves. A lawyer advises; the business decides.
Where the line runs
What we carry
Employment, pay, absence, professional insurance, supervision of legal quality, and finding a replacement if one is needed.
What you carry
Direction of the work, the conditions the person works in, and the commercial decisions their advice feeds into.
Sources: Guide to private employment agencies (International Labour Organization, 2025), quoting the Private Employment Agencies Convention, 1997, article 1(1) on making workers available to a user enterprise and articles 11 and 12 on allocating responsibilities.
Stages of work
The brief and the level.
What the person will actually handle, what they will be allowed to decide, and who they report to on your side. A senior lawyer given junior work leaves; a junior given senior work is a risk you carry silently.
Naming the person.
You meet the candidate and see their work before anything starts. We do not put forward an anonymous resource and substitute quietly, because the point of this arrangement is that your team knows who is sitting with them.
Conflicts before access.
We check conflicts across the firm before the person sees anything of yours. Discovering one later would break the engagement in the middle, which is worse for you than a delay at the start.
Working inside your week.
Your stand-ups, your systems, your queue. Written answers by default, so that what the person produces survives their leaving and does not have to be asked again.
Cover and replacement.
Illness, holiday and the case where the fit is simply wrong. All three are agreed in writing at the start with a named alternative, which is the part that distinguishes this from a freelancer.
What you keep when it ends.
Templates, the reasoning behind decisions, the calendar and the open items, handed over on a date you set. If what you actually need is a permanent colleague, start from legal recruitment; if the whole function has to be designed first, start from in-house legal setup and audit.
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