Insight Local Government Lawyer Insight July 2017 9 and Information; Planning & Highways; Property; Dispute Resolution; Child Protection; and Adult Social Welfare. Technology will also play an important role in differentiating Invicta Law’s offering. Invicta has used Peppermint Technology to implement its Microsoft dynamic client relationship management (CRM) system, which aims to provide clients with a state-of-the-art digital service whilst making back office processes more efficient. The system will enable Invicta Law to automate as much of the legal process as possible, enabling it to deploy its lawyers more efficiently and allowing it to provide fixed pricing and 24-hour access to their cases through a client portal. “This system is built around the customer and that’s really what we want the practice to stand for,” Wild says. “It’s not going to be a traditional law firm in many ways.” Small beginnings There is some distance to travel before Invicta Law gets close to its stated aim. While already a reasonably substantial size for a specialist law firm, less than 20% of its revenue currently comes from external sources, with the vast majority of its instructions emanating from Kent County Council, with which it began a 10- year contract to provide its legal services on launch. (Five lawyers, led by Ben Watts, have remained at Kent County Council to deal with governance issues and to act as the ‘intelligent client’.) In recent weeks, however, Invicta Law has scored some notable successes, being one of the 22 legal advisers appointed to the new national legal services framework agreement for the higher education sector (worth potentially £70m a year overall) and also winning a place on the West Yorkshire local authorities panel in July. Wild says that others are in the pipeline. “We know how much pressure there is on public finances across the board at the moment, so we're looking to provide an alternative offer, a culturally attuned and efficient service, at lower cost,” he says. “We think that, by doing that, we can grow our size.”. One of the criticisms sometimes made of Wild’s approach to traded services is that it threatens the status - and even livelihoods - of the lawyers in councils that send their work to other authorities. This is a perception that he is keen to address. “We're not trying to take over legal departments,” he says. “We want to support our colleagues in-house, because we know that sometimes they've got an extremely difficult job to do with very limited resources. They're having, at the moment, to choose whether they can bring in staff, and sometimes it's difficult to get the approval to spend on new staff. The whole ethos seems to be, 'You've got to lose people', when actually the wise move would be to recruit people. Or, they've got to go out to the market and buy in their legal service, or they run the risk of not having any legal advice at all, which is probably the worst of the three options. “So what we're trying to say to them is, 'Look, let us help you'. Not to take over, not to tell you that we're better than you, because we know darn well we're not. We're just saying, 'We want to be a trusted supporter and adviser system to you, to enable you to do your jobs'. It's really trying to sit alongside people, rather than confront them head on. That's never been my style and I don't intend it to be now.” Moreover, Wild says that there is an additional need for legal advice that the cost of external advice has prevented from being sought. There are also large swathes of the public sector – parish councils and schools, for example – which are significantly under-advised at present. “I have come across in some of the client authorities we work for where they Fig 5 Fig 6