Collaborating for amazing results

Had a fantastic and interesting meeting with a potential new client today.

An exciting package of work, an imminent deadline, lots of relationship management required both in the supply chain and the internal teams. Culturally this client is an ideal match for us – entrepreneurial spirit, embracing change, big vision, people and customer focussed, and an open minded approach to how we engage with them.

The support they need at this stage is essentially a re-negotiation of a large number of contracts to support a critical business change. It needs to be done quickly and it needs to be done by engaging directly with the business internally to interpret the technical requirements into contractual requirements. The new contracts need to be flexible enough to allow alignment with future strategic plans. It needs to be done at pace, and it needs a pragmatic approach and ‘good enough’ mentality, rather than pedantic, perfect and polished legal drafting and protracted discussions.

At this stage the client doesn’t have a fixed view on how the task should be executed, nor a clear understanding of what the specific barriers may be. We can first and foremost help them to design an engagement model and agree a communications plan before moving swiftly to execute and negotiate.

Essentially, a match made in heaven for the commercial support we are able to provide, and music to our ears in terms of ‘let’s have some fun making this happen.’ We thrive on variety and challenge, we love an opportunity to use our legal training to good effect by driving business change, we pride ourselves on being able to work swiftly and intelligently as a conduit to translate technical requirements into contract language.

What was most satisfying however, is to get a reminder that businesses are not now always just treading the usual path of bringing in external legal support. This particular client actually shies away from engaging a traditional external legal team because it wants solutions and direct accountability for outputs. We are discussing a work-package whereby we take responsibility for the delivery of the end result. It wants commercial advice from experienced people willing to embed themselves in the business and ask the right questions and provide healthy challenge with its teams and suppliers, working always in a collaborative way.

It’s a great example of a forward-looking business proactively seeking creative commercial advice at the right time to meet its specific needs.

Where do we sign?