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LocalGovernmentLawyer The Legal Department of the Future February 2016 17 As one delegate told the roundtable the traditional approach to the allocation of resources in local government is disadvantaging legal teams in the post- austerity environment Ive come to the conclusion that local government suffers now from budget management. Its done it for years and its worked very well but across all councils now the only thing you have is reduction. Managers are just confined by their budgets which they have to reduce usually by reducing staff and output. But we cant reduce output once weve taken the work on. We risk breaching our duties to the court and we risk our responsibilities to the SRA. Once weve taken work on we need to do it. So the key question for the delegates at the roundtable was this what can be done by local authority legal departments to square the circle of falling revenue and rising workloads Empowering the client Internally many authorities are working more closely with clients to forecast future workflows and to enable client departments to do more of it themselves reducing their reliance on the legal department. However the roundtable delegates generally agreed that there remains much to be done in this respect and that managing client demand is a growing problem as more senior members of staff have left or retired because of budget cuts. The growing lack of experience in client departments was identified as one of three biggest challenges by more than a third 36 of survey respondents. At Essex Legal Services Assistant Director Law and Operations Angela Hutchings detailed her departments comprehensive programme to empower clients to take decisions for themselves where possible. This consists of a number of initiatives including the production of articles how-to guides and FAQs by in- house lawyers providing training and legal surgeries within client departments and a phone a friend facility for clients. Where youre seeing senior officers in the business who are leaving or retiring and younger people coming through who dont have the same experience that corporate memory is being lost and so were trying to rebuild it. she said before adding that this not an overnight task. It is a lot of effort and it can feel like one- way traffic at times but it does eventually gain traction. You just have to stick with it she said. Delegates reported that empowering clients to take their own decisions is particularly difficult with child protection work. At Southwark Director of Law and Democracy Doreen Forrester-Brown said that her department had had some success in reducing the number of child protection cases from 120 a year to around 45 through helping to improve the governance regime within the Childrens Services team. She said A lot of that was around making sure that childrens services put in place proper governance networks. And we advise them what their structures might be in order for decisions to be made safely but also to be clear about where the risk is being managed. What weve found is that our work has changed from having lots and lots of cases in court to actually managing it through the Public Law Outline. Once its outside of the court process the departments are managing quite a lot of risk. So while you need to be careful it is about getting that governance right and pushing that responsibility back onto the clients. The knowledge gap Internal efficiency is also being driven by the adoption of legal technology although again there is still some distance to travel before the benefits are being fully realised across the local government legal sector. Paul Evans Assistant Director of Corporate Governance and head of the South London Legal Partnership the shared legal service of the London boroughs of Merton Kingston-upon- Thames Richmond-upon-Thames and Sutton estimated that councils across London could save more than 1m through moving to paperless working alone but progress in adopting the latest legal technology has not been helped by budget cutbacks and the more general slowdown in investment in authority-wide IT systems. Tanya Corsie Director and Chief Operating Officer at legal IT supplier Iken told the roundtable that the situation was changing rapidly in response to some of the needs identified by the survey. Ive found that increasingly people are trying to interact much more with their clients sharing workflows and enabling their clients to access self-service information so we have been doing a lot of work around client intranets and online communication. This can create issues around data security and ensuring that sensitive information is only shared with those that are authorised to see it but good systems will have safeguards built in. I think a lot of technology companies tend to consider local government conservative with regards to some of their technology needs but there is a real desire to work smarter now and its a really exciting time to be working with local government teams. The sector was also a late adopter of workflow management systems compared with private practice not least because some lawyers joined local government with the aim of avoiding time recording but this is changing rapidly as the need for legal departments to demonstrate their value through metrics has become increasingly important. We need data to back up our assertions not just our professional judgement if we are not just to be seen as a cost at a time when work is rising between 5 and 10 year-on- year said David Tatlow Director of Legal and Democratic Services at Birmingham City Council. What I have done is to identify the number of work types that weve got which at Birmingham is 180. We then give an indicative time a target for each one. As we know the volume of work for each of the 180 work types we multiply that If work continues to increase by 5-10 each year I can justify further recruitment but without the data it can be a real battle to persuade people that we need more resource. David Tatlow Birmingham City Council