Mitigate risks, avoid conflict, and minimize cost!

When it comes to hiring a legal service provider – especially with repeat work – it often comes down to who you know. Comedian Ronny Chieng understands this concept perfectly well –

“Finding a good barber is like finding a good lawyer – you gotta go to the same guy.”

And in practice, that is often the case. You go to who you know, to who you can trust and to who you can rely on.

This doesn’t come easily. Especially when legal expense often comes with a hefty price tag. But this is where the concept of legal retainer services comes in.

What are legal retainer services?

According to Cornell Law School –

“Retainers are a type of compensation agreement with lawyers either for reserving their employment or as compensation for future services.

General retainers are the traditional type of retainers where a lawyer agrees to handle a case or future issues that arise for a client. These agreements can be adjusted for the specific needs of the client such as periods of time or preventing the firm from representing competitors, but the goal of a general retainer is to ensure a lawyer or law firm’s availability should an issue arise.”

With this type of arrangement in place, your legal service provider isn’t just someone you brief. With a regular arrangement in place, your legal service provider becomes an integral member of your team. The effect of this? You work more closely with them to ensure that you mitigate risk and avoid conflict. An ideal situation really – a prevention is better than the cure type of situation.

How can legal retainer services help you?

Besides having someone on your side and at the ready to assist you at your behest, you have ultimate peace of mind knowing that you have immediate access to legal advice as soon as you need it. And if you deal with specific legal issues on a regular basis, having legal retainer services in place keeps a close tie between you and your legal service provider – especially needed when questions arise that require immediate attention.

Remember legal service providers acting on retainers become an integral part of your team, learning everything there is to know about the company and acting in close consultation with you on all matters to ensure you mitigate any risk and avoid possible conflict.

In addition, if there’s a problem or a query that pops up, you’re able to contact your legal service provider at will, without the worry of “billable hours” mounting up. Often one is scared to pick up the phone for fear of exorbitant hourly costs, adding more strain to a situation which could be sorted out with a simple telephone call. By being on retainer, you are free to pick up the phone or draft an email without concern about adding to an existing bill. Giving you freedom to simply get on with business knowing that your legal concerns are well taken care of.

The important take away here? Understanding that fixing a problem is far more expensive than doing things correctly from the get-go (the overarching benefit of having a legal service provider on a retainer).

Contract Management

This is especially true when it comes to managing your contracts – from the initial drafting stage to the review, amendment and finally the signature stage.

But it doesn’t end there. Managing the contract during its lifecycle taking note of all important dates i.e. when a product needs to be delivered or a service needs to be performed as well as respective payment dates, becomes crucial.

By having your legal service provider on retainer and managing this whole process from the get-go, you ensure that you’re not left out in the cold with a contract that doesn’t suit your needs. Or worse – a contract you should never have entered into in the first place.

Better still is if your legal service provider can automate the contract life cycle from drafting, negotiation, signing to the storing of all your contracts in one central place.

With that, your contracts are managed! Easy as that.

Compliance Management

With a multitude of Act’s setting out compliance obligations, there’s no denying that doing business on a day-to-day basis can be a cumbersome and troublesome experience.

Whether it’s the –

• Financial Centre Intelligence Act 38 of 2001 (and its associated amendment), South Africa’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing legislation. The KYC obligations are particularly important and entails determining whether there are any money laundering or terrorist financing risks associated with a new client, or
• Protection of Personal Information Act 4 OF 2013 (POPI) which requires how businesses interact with their client base adheres to South Africa’s privacy laws, or
• (heading to the international arena) the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which is a set of written standards, developed by major card brands (like VISA and Mastercard) and maintained by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC), or
• European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which is the EU’s answer to privacy and security law, imposing hefty obligations on organizations around the world, when targeting or collecting data related to people in the EU.

Non-compliance with these Act’s is not an option!

Having a legal service provider on retainer ensures that your compliance woes are handled. Simple as that!

Better still is if these obligations can be completely managed, whether it’s being able to track all compliance obligations (be they government regulations, statutory compliances, and internal governance), or tracking important regulatory deadline dates, having someone on your side will save you the hassle and also mitigate the risk of being non-compliant.

And in today’s economy, that’s vital.

Debt collection management

Like we said above regarding fear of calling a legal service provider because of mounting legal costs, the same concept applies here.

Debt collection services will involve multiple telephone calls, emails and in some instances Letters of Demand and the drafting of Summonses to illicit payment from a debtor. This can sometimes be for multiple matters. And the fear of mounting legal costs becomes very real. Very quickly.

By having a legal retainer in place, it ensures that you’re not charged for each telephone call, or every email or Letter of Demand sent. Again, this could be for multiple, sometimes many matters. By having a legal service provider on retainer, you can ensure that you pay a set fee for this process and not for individual costs for each line item. Not only minimizing cost but ensuring that your debt recovery is managed and money that is owed to you is obtained.

If your legal service provider can provide for the –

• tracking of progress, deadline dates and potential litigation spend,
• reporting to clients on any of the matters within minutes,
• automation of the litigation drafting templates (Like letter of demands, summons and pleadings), and
• storing of all the legal notices, pleadings, and documents for each matter in one central place.

Partnering with Inhouse Lawyer

Everything we have set out above may seem like a lot to take in. And you may be sitting there wondering who to partner with. Who can take over these obligations for you? Who can you trust to add value to your existing service offerings.

Well, that’s where Inhouse Lawyer steps in.

If you are you an attorney, legal consultant, accounting firm or company providing legal services, partnering with us may be exactly what you have been looking for – especially if you want to add even more value to your current service offerings.

By using our legal department software, you can help your clients manage all of their legal operations as follows:

• CRM: onboarding of clients’ vendors and customers.
• Contract Management: drafting, negotiation, signing (electronically) and managing all types of contracts and contract dates (renewal dates).
• Matter Management: management of legal disputes such as civil litigation, labour disputes, insurance claims and so forth.
• Debt collection and legal spending management: you can streamline the debt collection process and save the client on legal fees.
• Compliance management: management of legal compliance, such as labour, health, and safety, POPI and corporate compliance.

And the benefits speak for themselves –

• A central platform, where legal practitioners and their clients can see and collaborate on all contracts and legal matters.
• Software that allows a legal practitioner to provide monthly legal retainer services and bespoke legal services.
• Software that enables you to act as the client’s legal advisor, assisting with all their legal operations.

In a nutshell – becoming indispensable to your clients through the clever implantation of the right software for your business.

Inhouse Lawyer is perfectly poised to assist you in a way that makes the management of your matters as simple as it can possibly be.

If you have any questions relating to the information we have set out above or if you are interested in booking a free demo, feel free to drop us a line.