Local Government Lawyer Insight July 2017 LocalGovernmentLawyer 8 Invicta Law – the Alternative Business Structure (ABS) spun off from Kent County Council’s legal department – started trading on 1st June. Invicta Law is arguably the most ambitious council ABS to date and only the second (after LGSS Law) to fully separate itself corporately from its originating authority. At the helm is chief executive Geoff Wild, longstanding Director of Governance and Law at Kent County Council and a well-known radical thinker on the future of local authority legal services. Currently, 130 lawyers and 30 support staff strong, Invicta Law’s ultimate aim is to “become the leading legal services provider to the public sector” within the next 10 years, growing its revenues from £10.8m to nearly £30m in the process. It is quite an ambition, and Wild concedes that the route to achieving it is an unchartered one. However, he also points out that the current shape of the £3bn public sector legal market - including central government, non-departmental public bodies, emergency services, educational institutions and health providers as well as local government - means that the opportunity is there to fulfil it. “We think it's right to have a very clear vision and an aspiration about what the goal is to be,” Wild says. “The fact is there isn't a leading provider of legal services to the public sector at the moment. There are a lot of good providers out there but the primary focus of most of those providers is not to serve the public sector. They do an awful lot of other things as well, and the public sector features as part of their wider portfolio. “We are very much focused on delivering a comprehensive and different service to the public sector than they perhaps have been used to up until now, certainly from the private sector, but also as a support to our in-house colleagues. “And we still regard ourselves as in- house in many ways. We're very much rooted in our historic public sector in- house background and we want to hang on to that ethos, understanding that cultural identity for as long as we can. That may not be possible as we morph into our private sector future, but we very much want to retain that if we can.” The business is organised along seven specialist workstreams, namely Corporate & Commercial; Education Employment Fig 4 Fig 4 Derek Bedlow speaks to Invicta Law’s chief executive Geoff Wild to hear his plans for the local authority-owned ABS launched in June by Kent County Council. Brave new world