Big can be beautiful

With some 50 local authorities as members, EM Lawshare is comfortably the largest legal services consortium in the UK and earlier this year it unveiled a revamped panel of law firms. Philip Hoult asks Jayne Francis-Ward, Assistant Chief Executive at Nottinghamshire County Council, how the group has developed and what its plans for the future are.

This was the second time you have asked firms to tender. What has changed at EM Lawshare since it was launched in 2006? What lessons have you learned?

At Nottinghamshire, we had a partnership arrangement in place long before EM Lawshare came into being. So we had already learned a lot of lessons about what we should and should not be doing. That helped us frame the initial tender for the consortium in 2006.

One of the things that has come out of it is that a lot of people will join something like EM Lawshare because it’s free and it’s there if they want it. They are not committed to using it if they don’t need to use it.

We now have 50 members (the original consortium had 14) – some use it on a very regular basis for legal work, while some use it on a regular basis for legal work and for training. We do have a proportion of members that don’t use it, but still want to be part of it in case there’s something that they need further down the line.

Our members use it as a networking organisation too. What you get as part of your membership is a list of not only the private practice solicitors, but also the local authorities’ ones as well. We’ve obviously got a lot we can learn from each other – to a greater or lesser extent we are dealing with the same issues at the end of the day.

That networking opportunity is particularly useful for the district councils that have between one and five people in their legal department. They can make contact with someone at a similar council or a county or unitary, a bit like you’d pop into a colleague’s office to bounce ideas off them.

We were very clear with the bidders about the amount of money that had been spent in the contract previously and the fact that 50 members did not mean there would be 50 departments instructing them. There might be 35 or 40, but there will be some that very rarely send them instructions.

For the first tender, we had 13 areas of work and we said that firms had to cover a minimum of six. This time we said that they had to do all 13. The prizes for the partner firms are the large contracts that which mainly come from the counties and unitaries, but we want the small districts to have as much use out of it as the counties or the unitaries do.

Whilst requiring firms to offer all 13 areas does restrict to a degree the number that could bid for it, we still got a very good field of potential partner firms – all of whom had experience in all 13 of the areas.

We have now gone up a firm from four to five (DLA Piper and Antony Collins have joined Browne Jacobson, Freeth Cartwright and Weightmans) – the consortium had grown and we needed to ensure there was more capacity within the partner firms.

Another change is that when we went out to tender the first time, we said “You tell us what you’re willing to give us in terms of added value”. This time we were very specific about certain things that we wanted. For example, we’ve had an EM Lawshare website since the start of the last contract but we only had limited funding so it was only a limited website. It couldn’t do all the things we wanted it to do.

So we said to the firms “we want you to do this as you have the expertise”. We asked them to come up with suggestions as to what we can do and how we can improve it; we also asked them to maintain it for us as well.

The idea is to increase the accessibility of the website. For example, at Nottinghamshire we might instruct someone on a highways matter. They might have exactly the same problem at Leicestershire or Staffordshire. There’s no point all three of us taking advice on it. The contract says we can share that advice with other authorities; the firms have signed up to that. There are huge savings to be made from this approach.

Do members share work between each other? Are there plans to offer work to other departments first?

We have only done this in an informal sense. Certainly at Nottinghamshire we have done work for at least three of the other participating authorities in EM Lawshare.

It’s something we want to explore in more detail and something the website would be useful for – people could post that they would be happy to handle employment or contract work or whatever it is.

And it could go both ways; licensing is a very good example as at county level you only very occasionally get licensing matters to deal with. We don’t have expertise – it’s more cost effective if we ask a district or unitary council to cover that matter as they have the necessary expertise.

At the time of the first tender, it was forecast that EM Lawshare would help member authorities make substantial savings. Were these realised? Do you expect additional savings this time round?

If you look at the hourly rates we got, they were considerably reduced from what they would have been if we had just gone out as individual local authorities. We have got even better rates now than under the previous contract. Now we have 50 members, we could be looking at considerably bigger cash savings.

Another area where we have made substantial savings is training. We have a very active programme and instead of spending £300 or £400 a day plus travelling expenses down to London, you can access something locally for £80. As we now have 50 authorities as members, the savings you can make on that programme are substantial.

There have certainly been some non-cashable savings as a result of the sharing of advice or because you don’t have to run a tender every time for a piece of work, but amassing the information in terms of what you have actually saved is quite problematic to do – it’s a bit of a case of sticking your finger in the air.

I wouldn’t want to sit here and say that we’ve definitely made all of the non-cashable savings predicted in 2006. But in terms of the cashable savings, yes, I think we’ve made that when you look at the amount of work that has gone out and what we would have paid without the arrangements.

How does EM Lawshare fit in with the shared services agenda? Could it lead to something similar to Lincolnshire Legal?

With the current financial climate and the budgetary difficulties facing public bodies we all need to consider sharing services but we also have an eye to Total Place.

At the moment EM Lawshare has a predominantly local authority-based membership – we also have a few police and fire authorities – but I am very keen to get health bodies involved as well.  I think we can save them a lot of money.

I have already had conversations with a local PCT that is very keen to be part of the consortium. I’m hoping that once we get one on board, the rest will follow suit because there’s no reason why they wouldn’t.

There are a huge number of benefits in working together and I hope that the relationships and the trust that has been built up as a result of EM LawShare will be a solid foundation on which we can build to help find solutions in these difficult financial times. We all need to be more open to new ways of working.

You now have a much larger consortium. Do you plan to beef up your operations?

The management team has representatives from a county council, a unitary and a district council in addition to me as Nottinghamshire has led on this. It was this group who worked on the re-tendering process.

We are looking to expand; we’re also going to appoint a part-time project administrator. It wouldn’t be a lead role, but rather someone to collate and analyse information, promote the website, and ask the members what they want. That will be funded out of the training programme as the private firms give their time for free.