As your business expands, regular legal advice becomes increasingly important. Due to the high costs associated, most SMEs will not hire an in-house General Counsel, but will instead hire external solicitors on an ad-hoc, reactive basis. The more efficient and valuable solution is to have a Virtual In-house Counsel, where your company is charged a fixed fee for a prescribed amount of legal services, without having to worry about the cost of hourly billing. Having a Virtual In-House Counsel provides for greater synergy and commercially driven outcomes.

Hiring a Virtual In-House General Counsel gives you on-call accessibility to legal experts, allowing you to take control of your legal issues proactively, as they arise and before they grow into larger, more costly complications. Not only will your company have the benefit of immediate, on-call legal advice, you will also have access to the specialty knowledge of an entire legal team, overcoming the greater cost and limitation of hiring a single in-house solicitor.

Some of the activities that can be included under the Virtual In-House Lawyer arrangement include:

• Contract reviews and ‘terms of trade’ reviews
• Negotiation support
• Tender / proposal support
• Contract drafting
• Support with business development and sales activities
• Dispute resolution, litigation support / management and claims preparation
• External Legal management
• Compliance reviews
• Legal risk management
• Assistance with acquisitions a disposals
• Due diligence activities
• Policy reviews
• Debt recovery
• Training on legal issues and legal risks
• General legal advice across a variety of topics including trade practices / consumer law, privacy, contracts, employment, licensing and compliance requirements, personal properties securities act, loans and procurement, advice to Directors and senior management on legal duties
• Property related issues including leasing, purchasing, building a Government approvals