NewLaw ventures have won a lot of press lately as the vehicle which will help the often inflexible, slow-to-adapt traditional firm stay afloat in an evolving and unpredictable global legal services market.

However, for former general counsel Chris Dancey, neither traditional private practice firms nor their NewLaw counterparts are equipped to sufficiently meet the unique needs of in-house counsel. Mr Dancey's own venture, Augment General Counsel, is looking to combine the flexibility of NewLaw with the specific knowledge, skill-set and focus of in-house lawyers in order to help legal departments find their foothold in the NewLaw revolution.

'I think the skill-set for in-house counsel is quite different,' says Mr Dancey of the specific needs an in-house department has of its outside counsel. While case-by-case expertise may not always be available from either traditional or NewLaw offerings, injecting the 'GC mindset' into NewLaw opens up the quality of outside advice available to GCs and their teams, he argues.

'You might not know everything there is to know about superannuation but what you do know is how is how to deal with triaging the day to day business legal issues that a corporation will come up against.'

As a pioneer in the field, Augment General Counsel offers two parallel services to provide onshore and offshore support to in-house teams in both Australia and the broader Asia Pacific region. As an Australian-registered legal services provider, Augment is able to offer a flexible pool of former GCs available for secondment to in-house departments or to businesses not yet big enough to have their own legal team. Its Philippines-based Centre for Law Department Excellence offers an alternative, cost-competitive offshore outsourcing service for businesses and in-house teams seeking expertise and support in legal, compliance, risk and governance issues.

'Corporations now have a third choice to simply sourcing these services from traditional law firms or doing it all themselves in house,' says Mr Dancey.

Source: Australasian Lawyer