In the post-COVID-19 era, many companies are seeking remote services. Legal services are no exception to this trend. Many lawyers work remotely, trading gleaming conference rooms and high overhead costs for video conferences and teleconferences.
But the basic model of the law firm as “black box” still remains in some circles: You hire the firm, but you don’t know which lawyers will actually be doing the work. Even if you deal with a certain partner – even a name partner of the firm – you may find that the real work is done by a faceless group of lawyers whom you’ll never meet. The partner is just the “rain maker” who generates the business. But the service partners – or usually lower level associates – will do the actual work. That means that when a company picks up the phone to find out about a contract or a business deal or a distribution agreement, for example, the lawyer they’ve been dealing with will have no idea. “I’ll get back to you on that,” the lawyer will say. “Can you just tell me X or Y?” But the response of the attorney is always: “No, let me get back to you.”
The problem with the faceless law firm model of doing actual work is that it can miss the nuances of what a company needs. Out-of-the-box solutions like Rocket Lawyer or Law in a Box documents also don’t capture the important details of a particular company’s situation. For that, an attorney needs to be a genuine part of the team and understand the company’s business in detail from the inside. Remote lawyering doesn’t mean familiarity if it’s just faceless.
Inside Outside Counsel is the opposite of that. It matches a dedicated service lawyer to each company, allowing the company and the lawyer to get to know one another. While fractional general counsel services can likewise be faceless, Inside Outside Counsel’s dedicated fractional general counsel lawyers are outsourced and thus much less expensive but at the same time, they are also insiders, they get to know the company and its officers and business and deals. They get to know the particular needs of their clients, and they never perform the actual with faceless teams. Thus, rather than being just another version of faceless lawyering, Inside Outside Counsel creates inside fractional general counsel services in which the business attorney actually becomes a known part of the team and in turn gets to know well the needs of the business.
Moreover, Inside Outside Counsel does the work for companies and lawyers, only attempting to match attorneys with companies where that match is likely to prove a good fit. While the lawyer and the company will always be in charge of the lawyer client relationship, it’s not as much of a gamble when the experienced lawyers are prescreened and where the company’s needs are examined prior to the matching between lawyer and client occurring. Thus, unlike many outsourced legal counsel services, Inside Outside Counsel takes a lot of the discomfort out of the process. And everything is done online, easily and comfortably from the comfort of the company’s own desk and the lawyer’s own workstation. With billing and document storage all provided online as well.