Most lawyers and law firms operate like taxis. If you ask them to take you to Waterloo, that’s what they will do, and they will charge you by the hour for however long it takes to get there. I’m much more likely to say “Why do you want to go to Waterloo? And if that’s definitely the best destination for you, why don’t you go by tube? It’s faster and cheaper.” In other words, I make sure that your legal buck gets maximum bang. If you want to read my fuller explanation of Why Law Firms Don’t Work, it’s here.

Most lawyers bill by the hour - I try very hard not to. It’s a poor system which misaligns the incentives of seller and buyer: the slower I work, the more you pay; the faster I work, the less I earn. There’s no correlation between hours incurred and the value delivered.

Try this thought experiment. A CEO runs a business which bills by the hour. What’s the fastest way for him or her to increase revenues? He/she fires the business’ most efficient workers. The remaining workers do the remaining work, but are slower and so more is charged and revenues are increased. Hey presto! Problem solved!

Instead I try agree a fixed price which reflects the value delivered. More on my approach to pricing here.

I believe there should be ROI on legal spend. That means for every £1 spent on legal issues, you should be getting more than £1 back. I reckon that with every £1 spent on me, you will get at least x5 of value in return. (Yes, I know it’s hard to measure and validate).

I’m B2B SaaS specialist. That means I know SaaS legals (IPR, data, GDPR, plus the relevant fintech regs) inside out (and I publish in academic journals on IPR and GDPR). For you, that means that I really know my stuff. I have a minimum learning curve in relation to your product and your company, I know what’s market standard and what isn’t, and I know which issues we really need to nail in the contract and the ones we can be more relaxed about. This all adds up to minimal issues further down the line.

This means that, working with me, you will end up with better deals: I estimate that working with me means your end contract will be 50% better than working with another lawyer. Yes, all lawyers claim that they are commercial, but I actually am and here are a bunch of testimonials to back that up.

Negotiation is one my key skill sets. I’ve had a lot of practice at it and have negotiated contracts with some of the toughest negotiators in the world: Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Blackstone, Prudential. (I also know the most efficient way to get round difficult procurement departments). The key to successful negotiation is preparation. I take my clients through the deal terms before the negotiation starts, going through the alternative positions and the trade offs involved. This means that, once the negotiations start, we’re strongly positioned to think and move faster than the other side.

The combination of the three previous skill sets means that, for those customers that want it, I can act as an ongoing consigliere – a business partner that adds real value. This is typically part of the virtual GC service.

I started off in law firms but went in-house pretty quickly. In-house lawyers look at the world differently to law firm lawyers. They understand how Pricing, Service and Sales need to come together to produce successful contracts. And they have, from lived experience, a much better understanding of the gap between theory and practice. For you, that means less faffing about with legal points that are not important.

Sales-Side lawyers are different to other lawyers: we don’t just advise, we are front-line players and have an inbuilt motivation to close (profitable) contracts. We are pragmatic and have a fine-tuned understanding of where profit is made and lost, and of real risk as opposed to theoretical risk. We are effective negotiators - we know how to win points, what points to concede, and how to close good contracts quickly.

Because of the way that lawyers are trained, they tend to see every involvement as an ad hoc intervention, each one separate from, and bearing no relation to, the previous intervention. But if you want legal services to be deployed effectively in your business, you will need a lawyer that recognises the importance of process thinking. The ability to think about, and implement, a legal service as an end to end process is one of things that distinguishes me from other lawyers. I have advised on, and implemented, processes in many sectors, including retail technology, financial services, and payroll.

Most businesses consume legal services in an event-driven way: they wait for the fire to break out, and then they call in a lawyer to put it out.

Smarter businesses get lawyers that spend time on fire prevention. It’s not as exciting as putting out a fire (you don’t get any of that “phew…you really saved my bacon that time”… “Aw shucks it was nothing. Here’s my large invoice”), but it’s a lot cheaper and more manageable.

But fire prevention is essentially a defensive posture. To maximise the way a business consumes legal services, it needs a legal strategy that combines the defensive posture with an offensive posture (no, not that kind of offensive). Think maximising upside, as well as minimising downside.

Legal strategy is particularly important in the tech sector because of the importance of IP and the increased rate of change. And because so few tech businesses have a legal strategy, it’s a great way to get a competitive advantage.

What’s distinctive about legal strategy is that you not only need to have a view on how the market and technology will involve, but also how laws and legal concepts are going to evolve in response and - and this is where it gets tricky - how the two will interact.

I take work off your plate. Part of my value-add is the ability soak up and resolve the hundreds of points that make up a deal. I’ll then boil things down to the key elements that you need to take a view on. That means you get more clarity, and you win back time to spend on growing the business.