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The Legal Department of the Future February 2016 LocalGovernmentLawyer40 management is becoming more remote. Are local government lawyers special Another theme that emerges from various points of the survey is the desire for specialist legal skills to be recognised in grading terms as well as management skills. A large number of comments bemoan the fact that promotion and status can only be achieved by taking on more management responsibilities rather than through the development of high- level expertise in a given field of law a comment being that the only chance of promotion or a pay rise involves managerial tasks and less opportunity for quality legal work. There is no reward for experience or dealing with a high complexity workload. At face value promoting people based on their expertise would seem to be an unnecessary expense yet in some areas see article p43 management complain that they can only resource key areas such as procurement or planning through the use of expensive locum staff or by going out to private practice so the development of more specialist in-house practitioners perhaps in conjunction with other authorities would seem to be a win-win situation. The expense of using locums or private practice could be reduced whilst the career development prospects for many lawyers would be enhanced. Yet at the moment there appears to be a vicious circle of higher value work being sent out for lack of internal capability thereby denying the opportunity for in-house staff to develop the appropriate skills and experience. Due to limited resources big time- consuming projects can be outsourced as there may be limited capacity to deal with them in-house suggests one respondent. These should be retained as they are interesting offer a chance to develop skills and enable lawyers to deal with similar projects in the future. Such an initiative would potentially find a receptive audience. The survey went on