The Modern In-House Lawyer’s Guide: Better Contract Content, Alternative Fee Arrangements, And Early Stage Companies
It is all about creating value for clients in ways that are beneficial for you as well.
As the needs and wants of clients continue to change, so do the ways that lawyers need to deliver their services. These changes can be beneficial to clients and modern lawyers as well. Contract content that is optimized and improved beyond its standard design is a key element of becoming an effective modern lawyer, as is understanding how counsel is retained through alternative fee arrangements. Below, we will talk about these concepts with three professionals as well as discuss the steps to get into an early stage company as a general counsel.
The three lawyers speak to us about how the relationships built with clients can help move contracts and fee arrangements forward into the future, helping new lawyers find their ways into early stage companies in the process. This advice shows how changes are vital to modern law and how simple changes can make big differences. The insights these professionals share are thought-provoking and timely for where the world is today and where it is headed in the future.
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Chris Simkins is an experienced commercial lawyer who is head of contract optimisation at Simmons Wavelength. His work focuses on supporting companies in simplifying and improving their contract templates and playbooks. He creates modular contracts, writes plain-English content, and prepares documents for automation. He has spent most of his career creating, advising, and negotiating a wide range of contracts, including everything from large-scale outsourcing arrangements to consumer terms and conditions. In our conversation, he talks about his passion for finding practical ways to improve both contracts and the process itself.
Our discussion centers on the benefits and challenges of creating better contracts and using technology to optimize the content of these contracts. It is critical to make sure agreements are clear, balanced, and well-designed, including practical guidance for projects. Contracts are notoriously complicated, hard to decipher, and not always very user-friendly, but they do not need to be that way moving forward. Chris speaks on the sweet spot between drafting design and process.
Chris talks about the standard practice of companies amassing dozens of contracts, all of which are basically the same contract with very few differences. This redundancy can waste time and money for a company, leading to disorganization and confusion when contract changes need to be made. Simkins’ overall message is about figuring out what you need to say and then optimizing it to make sure you are saying it better and more clearly.
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Outside General Counsel And Alternative Fee Arrangement
For 20 years, Steven Shanker has helped the for-hire transportation business navigate the complex business and unique legal issues they face. He helps his clients mitigate and manage risk while also continuing to flourish despite the massive disruption brought about by Uber and Lyft. In this conversation, we talk about the reinvention of the relationship between the client and the lawyer through the creation of the outside general counsel role. This is a position that benefits both lawyer and client. Such arrangements can suit both parties, supporting a lasting working relationship between client and counsel.
Steven speaks about how the legal industry has historically been slow to adapt, even though adaptation is crucial to surviving and thriving in the for-hire transportation industry. Alternative fee arrangements and emphasis on the outside general counsel role have revolutionized the delivery of legal services, making it more cost-effective — a win-win situation. Steven speaks about these arrangements, encouraging efficiency and discouraging inefficiency. He also talks about the importance of natural conversations that include questions clients may have before meeting with counsels (and other questions that come up over time).
Another point Steven touches on is that this is a very different way for a workday, week, and month to be structured, as these lawyers are not always going into an office each day. Each month, he knows time will need to be set aside for any possible client needs and that getting back to clients quickly means that, over time, these arrangements will continue to grow and be profitable.
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Getting In The Door Of An Early Stage Company
Andy Dale is general counsel and chief privacy officer of Alyce Inc., a successful business-to-business gifting and engagement platform. In this conversation with Andy, I discuss the difficult task of getting hired as general counsel in an early stage company and the right way to convince founders and investors that it is vital to bring in a lawyer. This is a challenge that many modern lawyers come up against. He talks about how tricks and trends can help show the role’s value and ability to help sales, as well as what platforms and tools you will need to utilize to build critical relationships and display your value. Although it is hard to find your way into an early stage company as the general counsel, it is not impossible. Andy tells how.
Part of what Andy pinpoints in this relationship-building process is the necessity for clients to feel that, as a general counsel, you genuinely empathize with the situations with which they are dealing and show a commitment to creating a solution or finding answers, even if they aren’t immediately available. It is about changing the persistent view of legal as a cost center only. That is an unfortunate stigma that Dale states has been the standard for far too long. He agrees that getting in at an early stage is never easy but can be a great way to build a legal function from the ground up.
Whether it is optimizing contracts for clients, working on alternative fee arrangements, or getting your foot in the door as the in-house counsel at an early stage company, it is all about creating value for clients in ways that are beneficial for you as well. As the shift to digital contracts, alternate fee structures, and remote work continues in the law industry (and others), making processes for clients more straightforward and more efficient will become more critical than ever for the modern lawyer.
