Bringing outside
theories to
in-house law

What we do

We know legal operations inside-out and we bring fresh thinking from the outside-in.

Engo uses theories from other disciplines to implement smarter, leaner ways of working for in-house legal teams.

The traditional career path focuses on legal skills but spends no time teaching lawyers how to work efficiently and effectively. It’s no wonder some legal teams struggle.

That’s where Engo comes in. We take the red pen to inefficient processes, long-winded contracts and ballooning costs. We have created over 20 separate methodologies that give a high-performance boost to legal teams of all sizes.

We free lawyers from low-value tasks, allowing legal teams to focus on the kind of work that matters most. Strategic matters. Game-changing matters. The big stuff. The stuff lawyers are paid to do — the stuff they want to do.

Engo assists legal teams to run smoother, drive strategy and save their companies a lot of money.

Secondments.

If you are swamped, another option is a secondee.  We can arrange for someone with the right training and expertise to be seconded to your team, based at your premises or remotely.

If you need a lawyer, contact us here.  Lawyers interested in working on secondment for Engo should flag their interest here.

If you need a ProtoLawyer (i.e. a university student paralegal trained in Engo efficiency) contact our sister company ProtoLawyer.

Who we are

After working for many years in-house, it dawned on us that the best ideas and theories for running legal teams are found outside of law.

We researched these principles and developed specialised solutions for in-house legal teams. Other departments like Finance, IT and Marketing have been employing this kind of thinking for decades — now we’re helping in-house legal teams to catch up.

We’re experienced in-house lawyers. We’re experts in legal operations. And we love efficiency.

  • Jason Ryan
    Jason Ryan

    [email protected]
    0409 970 391
    LinkedIn

    My personality profile constantly shows up a ‘severe dislike for inefficiency’ and as a child my mother said I always took short cuts. It’s no wonder I find what I do so gratifying.

    I was one of the first to bring legal operations to Australia and became a founding member of CLOC (Australia). I practised as a commercial solicitor and in-house lawyer in Melbourne and London for companies such as BUPA, AXA, Foster’s, and Treasury Wine Estates sharing a lot of ideas with like-minded General Counsels.  We all knew there was a better way so I set about studying a range of theories such as efficiency, process improvement, problem solving, triage, prioritisation and the power of metrics and data.

    What appeals to me about the work we do is freeing an in-house team from ‘the grind of the small stuff’. Seeing people doing what they should be doing and being really happy about it is incredibly fulfilling.

  • Gavin Davis
    Gavin Davis

    [email protected]
    0409 261 374
    LinkedIn

    My love of efficiency comes from a family background in small business and my time as an officer in the military where I worked in various strategic intelligence roles.

    My aversion to inefficiency came about when I learnt the dark art of law firm time billing and its associated horrors. Moving in-house (ASX, Healius) made me realise that in-house lawyers often struggle with the skills and techniques of efficient work — it’s no surprise considering most lawyers are trained by law firms that treat inefficiency as a feature not a failure.

    For me, legal operations is all about helping other in-house lawyers re-order their working lives in a way that helps them and their organisations to achieve their goals.

Organisations we have helped

Jason and Gavin have helped various organisations including those below. We help in-house legal teams of all sizes and organisations without in-house legal teams.

Defining success

What does success look like?  In our experience it is the result of identifying specific problems and tackling them head-on with a tailored solution – we don’t push a standard product.

Do the following problems sound familiar?  Our staff have landed many projects just like these.

Simplifying legal and procurement workflows:

The Problem: The legal team is told to reduce costs even while the workload is increasing. Hiring extra lawyers is not an option.

The Solution: Simplify the entire legal and procurement workflow—from deal initiation to contract approval and signing. Re-engineer the way everything is bought, negotiated, contracted and approved. In other words, just engo* it.

The Benefits: Taking these steps helps redeploy legal resources onto strategic work, reduce negotiation hours and turnaround times for all matters.  Best of all, it gives the legal team a proactive role in helping the company increase speed to market.

*Yes, it is a word (well… it is now)

A legal team transformation:

The Problem: A small team of two is completely swamped with work, a lot of which is of low-importance, not requiring a lawyer. All employees are unclear when to engage Legal and other advisors. The templates are non-existent or not fit for purpose.

The Solution: Redesign the contract governance framework by providing clarity on when to engage advisors, setting new authority limits, ‘right-sizing’ the contracting methodology, creating new contract templates, and simplifying approval workflows. Engoed again.

The Benefits: Adopting these measures frees up the team so that they no longer do low-importance work. They are ‘light touch’ on medium-importance work and spend most of their time on high-importance work. All employees are now crystal clear on how each matter should be progressed which reduces ‘flopping’ (which is what we call time wasted due to indecision and lack of clarity). All transactions are done much faster. The legal team no longer needs to employ more people to keep on top of work.

A simplified compliance framework:

The Problem: The organisation wants a stronger, better-functioning regulatory compliance framework.  The existing framework is not sufficiently clear about employees’ compliance roles and there is no system for reporting back up the chain to management.

The Solution:  The solution is not to discard their framework and start again with our gold standard.  Instead, we can simply adjust it by changing or adding only where necessary to address the shortfalls. Next step is to redraft their policy documents to reflect these changes and brief the relevant staff individually so that the ‘transplant’ will ‘take’.  That’s right…completely engoed.

The Benefits: Taking these steps results in a regulatory compliance framework that is small enough to be efficient and big enough to get the job done—i.e. ‘right-sized’.  Staff are now clearer about their roles in compliance, management has a clearer view of their organisation’s compliance status and the organisation is more compliant in a real sense.

Articles

    • Let’s talk

    Jason Ryan
    [email protected]
    0409 970 391
    Gavin Davis
    [email protected]
    0409 261 374
    Adelaide
    147 Pirie Street
    		Melbourne
    360 Collins Street
    		Sydney
    37 Bligh Street

    © Engo 2021