KEY ISSUES TO ADDRESS FOR NEW COUNSEL
1. Poor leverage with big clients and little in the way of understanding how to negotiate around this leverage without external involvement.
2. Ill-defined risk across our contractual suite (particularly [key area] and indemnities).
3. No comprehensive exposure assessment with our insurers.
4. Lack of expertise in respect of consumer law, competition law and company law.
5. Inconsistent terms with many [key area] clients and a lack of clarity around shipping, risk and general logistics.
6. Difficulty tracking workflows and incorporating/managing feedback into legal documents.
7. Idiosyncrasies with senior members of teams needs to be well understood and managed.
8. Rarely are there clear baselines for negotiation or strong fall-back positions pre-agreement.
9. No clear rules around what we will or will not accept in a legal context.
10. New business areas [examples given] which have growing teams and little corporate oversight in a proactive, strategic sense.
11. Conflicts of interest about at a senior level and these are not well understood by the key parties involved. There has to be a thorough review of corporate governance and director compliance between [Entity A], [Entity B] and [Entity C].
12. Many commercial relationships (especially in [key area], and to an extent with [key area]) are undocumented, or poorly documented.
13. No access to legal data bases and no paid subscriptions to any available legal resources,
14. A legal document management system which has been set up by myself (the existing legal counsel) in a pragmatic way to suit my needs. Time will need to be spent explaining this and there are definitely systematic improvements that could be made. There should be a centralised document management system for legal contracts and correspondence, with workflow tracking, levelled permissions for access, and consistent naming and dating conventions. Key members of each team need to take responsibility for utilising that system.