Local Government Lawyer Insight July 2017 LocalGovernmentLawyer 10 simply haven't been aware sometimes that there was a legal issue that needed addressing and in consequence, they've been acting unlawfully, sometime for many years, without realising it,” he says. “Or, they've simply said, 'We'll hold off getting legal advice until the very last minute because we don't think we can afford it'. And then of course at the eleventh hour legal advice either ends up being too little too late, or it ends up being more expensive than if you involve people in the beginning. “Budgetary pressure is forcing or causing behaviours which place authorities and public sector bodies at risk of acting unlawfully. And it only takes one of those to be exposed - liability, fines, public exposure, publicity and political embarrassment, for it to be a very damaging issue. So what we're trying to do is say to people, 'Look, a stitch in time here can save you an awful lot of problems on the future.’” Flying the nest If all goes to plan, the proportion of work coming from Kent will drop to around 50% in five years and 40% at the end of 10. “We don't want to lose sight of Kent County Council as our main client, but we very much want to be able to not be wholly dependent or predominantly dependent on them in the long term,” Wild says. In the meantime, the ongoing relationship between Invicta Law and the county council will have to be managed. “It's got a new role, it's a client, our main client, and will continue to be so for some considerable time,” Wild says, “It's a commissioner now of its legal service, as opposed to having its in-house team, and it's also a shareholder and owner of what will hopefully be an appreciating capital asset. So it's got several hats to wear at different times. Getting those roles defined and clarified and understood by everybody is part of the journey we're on.” Kent County Council, under Wild’s leadership, has long been at the forefront of the traded legal services model. In the past, however, Wild has contended that the powers and ability act for other public bodies were always available to in-house teams and that there was no need for the expense of setting up a separate ABS. Wild himself describes the process as “four years of toil”. So what’s changed? The primary difference more recently has been the attitude of the Solicitors Regulatory Authority, (SRA), which has become considerably stricter in its interpretation of the rules on in-house departments’ external activities – most notably with regard to academy schools - over the past three years or so, and Wild expects the regime to become more restrictive still. “The ability to trade as widely as we would like as in in-house team has become difficult and will become more difficult in future,” he says. “The SRA’s direction of travel has been consistent - the ability for regulated bodies such as in- house legal departments to trade has to be on a level playing field through an ABS and they are restricting more and more that ability to sell services from an in- house position. That's not going to change.” More generally, the creation of the ABS has enabled Invicta to make investments into technology and the recruitment of senior professionals to operational and business development roles that would never have been possible as an in-house local authority legal team. The necessary physical separation from Kent County Council has enabled the new business to upgrade its office environment, the effect of Wild believes is often underestimated. “I can't overstate how important the physical environment is to bring about the cultural change that we needed to do by taking staff from an in-house environment to a company status,” he says. “Giving them a very different modern office environment, a professional environment, has done more than any amount of training we could do. They see themselves very differently, and are behaving very differently, which was so important.” The other advantage of being detached from its parent council is that it is no longer constrained by council pay scales, allowing it to be more competitive with private practice as well as rewarding existing staff for their efforts. This is just as well as Wild says that recruitment represents the greatest barrier to Invicta’s growth plans. “It's a difficult market at the moment, not only in the public sector but also in the private sector,” he says. “The market prices for good staff are going up, and that's a fact. We're not able to compete, for example, with the top-level law firms in terms of salary and bonus schemes but what we are able to compete with them on, and best them we think, is on the quality of work and the quality of life that we can bring. The flexible working, the additional offerings we can provide which are not just financially based, and it's having that mixture. “I think a lot of lawyers who have been in a larger law firm don't get the exposure necessary to the breadth and the depth and the quality of work that they'd like to do. They don't have a lot of client interaction, which has been quite an eye opener for me, because working in local government we're dealing with clients from senior politicians down to staff at all levels on a daily basis, and dealing with them face-to-face. “So as well as people from the public sector, we're trying to attract people from the private sector who want a different experience, and that quality of work, that exposure to clients, flexible and home working, plus a very good package of support and remuneration and reward. Hopefully that will allow us to bring those staff in.” Growing pains None of this comes cheap and Kent County Council has made a substantial – but undisclosed – investment into Invicta Law, which it 100% owns. Unsurprisingly, Wild is quick to praise the commitment shown by Kent County Council to the project, but nevertheless the process was far from frictionless. “What I have learned is how bloody hard it is to set up a business from scratch, and particularly from within a public sector body,” he says. “It's almost like giving birth, but the gestation period as being more than an elephant, and the labour pains being excruciating, and the umbilical cord has proved difficult to cut. It's because local government is, on the one hand, a very traditional organisation and very bound up in its statutory basis and its rules and regulations and procedures but it's very conscious of its need to break away from that at the same time. “So there's this real tension going on all the time in local government, about the desire to do things differently, the will to experiment and explore new opportunities, but then forever being held back by the regulations and the rules and the traditions sometimes, and the politics on occasion, that inhibit that sort of entrepreneurial spirit. That spirit is there in abundance in most authorities but it's