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The Legal Department of the Future February 2016 LocalGovernmentLawyer22 can be working with a series of models that helps us to deliver an efficient and effective legal service she told delegates. I think that can be specific to the types of work that youre doing - there may be certain areas of your work that fit well with a shared service some that work best in-house and others that may be suitable for doing through an ABS. I certainly do believe that we will continue to have in-house teams. But within that there are a number of models and there may be other creative options that weve still not really explored in part because we have spent so much time exploring the ABS model. Thriving in ambiguity Underpinning the topics discussed at the roundtable has been a fundamental change in the role and purpose of local government lawyers especially at the senior end. The rate of change in the local government legal sector is accelerating and the role of local government lawyers is changing with it. As the South London Legal Partnerships Paul Evans pointed out to delegates dealing with these issues is no longer ancillary to the day job of being the lawyer to the council they increasingly are the day job of senior lawyers. Everything weve talked about everything weve talked about in terms of strategy everything in terms of our priorities everything in terms of capacity for ABSs and trading services and marketing and relationships - if that is not part of your day job now I would revise your job description he said. Call it your day job. And say these are actually what were responsible for. Because that is the way practices move forward and can meet all these issues head on with a chance of landing successful solutions. This applies equally to lawyers further down the chain. Amongst the authorities represented at the roundtable HB Public Law has specifically added the ability to thrive in ambiguity to their lawyers jobs descriptions while Essex Legal Services has implemented a change management training programme to in the words of Angela Hutchings get people comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable. That there arent all the answers out there she said. Sometimes youre going to try something and its not going to work but you just have to keep moving forward. Many of the themes discussed at the roundtable are still at the early stages of development and when it comes to predicting the future for local authority legal departments the only certainty is that further change is inevitable. Local authority lawyers will need to be adaptable and flexible enough to work with it. In the meantime as Birminghams David Tatlow pointed out that the shape of local government legal teams will change in future should not be taken as a criticism of the job that local government lawyers have done to date. There is a danger that all this talk of change implies that local government lawyers arent fit for purpose but that couldnt be further from the truth he said. I dont think were thanked enough for what weve done for what were doing. Collectively we ought to be very proud of what weve done and are doing in legal services and we should look at these challenges in a very optimistic and a forward thinking way. Derek Bedlow is the publisher of Local Government Lawyer.