How to optimize business-driven legal support

Fondia has established a vision and purpose to provide its customers with “ optimized business-driven legal support ”. We simply call this the Fondia Way. This vision statement is neither humble nor modest, but reflects our attitude that we can make a difference. At the same time it reflects our opinion that the way legal support currently is provided is not optimal. We are not alone with this opinion as the coming of new law is foretold by highly regarded persons such as Richard Susskind and Jordan Furlong .

The traditional way of providing legal support is by operating your own in-house legal department and/or by buying services from law firms. The bigger the law firm, the lower the purchaser’s risk of being criticized if something goes wrong. And usually the bigger the bill for the relevant services. All this because of the hourly billing that still reigns despite all criticism presented over the years. You really cannot blame the industry for providing this service since it’s excellent business. A change must hence be buyer driven.

Over the last 10 years we have witnessed the rise of new law or emerging law , the task of which has been (and still is) to question the traditional ways of offering legal services and to innovate new and more efficient solutions. Fondia is one of the leading legal service providers in the Nordics participating in the new law movement. Our core business is the “ legal department as a service ” or LDaaS – a service designed to provide small, medium and currently also bigger companies with the legal support they need. This service has many advantages to the traditional ways of procuring adequate legal support and its purpose is to be proactive and prevent legal issues from arising. The contrast to traditional law firms is striking because their business blooms the more legal issues they are called to analyse, identify and solve. All other companies usually benefits the less legal issues there are.

Your favourite legal issue is the one you never need to face. Therefore, optimal legal support should be targeted at minimizing the legal issues and associated costs over time. And in my opinion legal costs do not only cover items such as litigation, negotiation and other reactive means to unwanted situations but also costs associated with the entire management of legal affairs. The common goal shared by legal service providers and buyers should be to minimize the legal costs by optimizing the occurrence of legal issues. I dare say that there is an optimal range of legal issues as the costs associated with minimizing such issues at some point increase more than the benefit received from an additional investment.

Optimizing the legal support of a business consequently means optimizing the marginal utility from legal affairs. The Fondia Way is to use proactive measures to increase the probability for an optimal outcome. One of the most practical ways to measure our success, is to measure how the overall costs related to legal services develop over time in relation to the level of the legal support received, the size of the business and in relation to benchmark figures of the relevant industry. If we deliver what we promise, there is a significant benefit to be achieved over time.