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Legal teams that prioritise efficiency will make more money
A new Adelaide-based law firm has designed an offering to ensure that in-house teams are more efficient.
Jerome Doraisamy
Engo, which opened its doors last week, is the brainchild of senior lawyers Jason Ryan and Gavin Davis, who have observed theories in industries outside of law and put it together with their legal operations experience to create a specialist legal operations provider bringing innovation to the in-house legal market.
“Other departments such as finance, IT and marketing have been employing this kind of thinking for a long time – and now we’re helping in-house legal teams to catch up,” Mr Ryan said.
After working for many years as in-house lawyers and at the forefront of legal operations, the pair realised that the best ideas and theories for running legal teams are found outside of law. They knew there was a better way, they said in a statement, and thus set about “studying a range of theories such as efficiency, process improvement, problem solving, tirage, mission analysis, prioritisation, and the power of metrics and data”.
“We know legal operations inside out and we bring fresh thinking from the outside in,” Mr Ryan continued.
“At Engo, we use theories from other disciplines to implement smarter, leaner ways of working for in-house legal teams.”
Mr Davis added: “Making a legal team more efficient makes the entire organisation more money.”
"When a legal team becomes overworked it may make sense to throw more people at the problem (especially during large projects or litigation) and other times it will make more sense to save huge amounts of time and money, to fine tune the legal advice process itself.
“Engo offers both. We eradicate the unnecessary – there are many unnecessary steps that in-house lawyers take because that is the way it has always been done.”
Moving forward, Engo will assist all sorts of organisations to enhance the way their legal operations are structured and managed, the pair said, noting it extends to all industries including large teams from ASX-listed mining and manufacturing companies, to one-person government regulator teams.
“A local, legal practice with this as its vision and mission has not existed in Adelaide until now,” Mr Ryan said.
Mr Davis said: “We are all for spreading the word about legal operations and helping other in-house lawyers reimagine their working lives, saving money and becoming more efficient.”
“We are excited to be at the cutting edge of a movement that is helping all sorts of organisations become more efficient and effective.”
Jerome Doraisamy
Jerome Doraisamy is the editor of Lawyers Weekly. A former lawyer, he has worked at Momentum Media as a journalist on Lawyers Weekly since February 2018, and has served as editor since March 2022. He is also the host of all five shows under The Lawyers Weekly Podcast Network, and has overseen the brand's audio medium growth from 4,000 downloads per month to over 60,000 downloads per month, making The Lawyers Weekly Show the most popular industry-specific podcast in Australia. Jerome is also the author of The Wellness Doctrines book series, an admitted solicitor in NSW, and a board director of Minds Count.
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