Case Study: Agile commercial contracting support

The client is a multinational information technology company providing services to customers worldwide.

Challenge:

The client is a global leader in its industry, with a strong procurement and commercial division that operates internationally across several jurisdictions. The legal team is responsible for providing legal advice and commercial contracting support to both units, while also being a responsive business partner. However, the rapidly changing business environment has limited the legal team’s ability to provide comprehensive legal advice, as their coverage is inflexible and cannot adapt to the commercial requirements of the company.

To address these challenges, the company needs to incorporate flexibility into its business model to quickly expand its team with experienced legal support. This will enable the legal team to better respond to the changing needs of the business and provide more comprehensive legal advice and support to both the procurement and commercial divisions.

Interim Legal’s specialized and customized approach:

With the cooperation of the responsible team head, Interim Legal gained a thorough understanding of the in-house legal team’s operating model and was able to develop a flexible support system to complement the existing commercial legal team. Drawing on its expertise in creating customized talent solutions within the legal services sector, Interim Legal leveraged its network of over 1000 legal and compliance specialists to identify multiple candidates with the requisite international procurement and services contracting experience and language skills.

Working closely with the in-house legal team, Interim Legal developed a flexible utilization schedule to accommodate the changing demands of the team. This approach enabled the in-house legal team to access specialized legal support whenever needed, without having to maintain a large permanent staff. Overall, the collaboration between Interim Legal and the in-house legal team helped to optimize legal operations, increase efficiency, and reduce costs.

Outcome:

Over the course of a year-long collaboration with the business, Interim Legal successfully increased bandwidth in commercial and procurement contracting, allowing the in-house legal team to become a more responsive business partner to the commercial divisions. Through multiple engagements, the legal department was able to achieve significant cost and time savings by leveraging Interim Legal’s services, rather than relying on traditional external counsel.

By working closely with the in-house legal team over an extended period of time, Interim Legal consultants gained a deeper understanding of internal processes and procedures, which ultimately increased their effectiveness and value to the legal department. As a result, the business was able to adopt a flexible model of legal support to better navigate the uncertain business environment. This successful model has since been extended twice and remains a key part of Interim Legal’s engagement portfolio.