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Legal teams that prioritise efficiency will make more money
A new Adelaide-based law firm has designed an offering to ensure that in-house teams are more efficient.
Jerome Doraisamy
Engo, which opened its doors last week, is the brainchild of senior lawyers Jason Ryan and Gavin Davis, who have observed theories in industries outside of law and put it together with their legal operations experience to create a specialist legal operations provider bringing innovation to the in-house legal market.
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The firm intends to help legal teams focus on the kind of work that matters most – “being strategic and game changing work”.
“Other departments such as finance, IT and marketing have been employing this kind of thinking for a long time – and now we’re helping in-house legal teams to catch up,” Mr Ryan said.
After working for many years as in-house lawyers and at the forefront of legal operations, the pair realised that the best ideas and theories for running legal teams are found outside of law. They knew there was a better way, they said in a statement, and thus set about “studying a range of theories such as efficiency, process improvement, problem solving, tirage, mission analysis, prioritisation, and the power of metrics and data”.
“We know legal operations inside out and we bring fresh thinking from the outside in,” Mr Ryan continued.
“At Engo, we use theories from other disciplines to implement smarter, leaner ways of working for in-house legal teams.”
Mr Davis added: “Making a legal team more efficient makes the entire organisation more money.”
"When a legal team becomes overworked it may make sense to throw more people at the problem (especially during large projects or litigation) and other times it will make more sense to save huge amounts of time and money, to fine tune the legal advice process itself.
“Engo offers both. We eradicate the unnecessary – there are many unnecessary steps that in-house lawyers take because that is the way it has always been done.”
Moving forward, Engo will assist all sorts of organisations to enhance the way their legal operations are structured and managed, the pair said, noting it extends to all industries including large teams from ASX-listed mining and manufacturing companies, to one-person government regulator teams.
“A local, legal practice with this as its vision and mission has not existed in Adelaide until now,” Mr Ryan said.
Mr Davis said: “We are all for spreading the word about legal operations and helping other in-house lawyers reimagine their working lives, saving money and becoming more efficient.”
“We are excited to be at the cutting edge of a movement that is helping all sorts of organisations become more efficient and effective.”
