Top Legal Marketplace Grows Outside General Counsel Services As Legal Departments Shrink

Top Legal Marketplace Grows Outside General Counsel Services As Legal Departments Shrink

As small businesses to larger businesses seek to trim expenses, in-house legal departments are becoming an obvious one, now that a growing number of reliable outside general counsel services exist to provide businesses with quality legal services but at much less costs than having an in-house legal department of lawyers.

Let’s start this out by saying the obvious: in-house legal departments are expensive. Having a team of several lawyers on staff plus the support personnel they require is costly. If you own a small business, even having just one full-time lawyer on payroll can seem like a monumental, heart attack inducing bill to pay. It’s no wonder that outside general counsel services are growing.

Lawyers provide countless services for businesses from filing for patents for a new product to advising managers on employee discrimination claims to applying for a work visa on behalf of a consultant from another country. However, with each of these issues a different specialty lawyer could be required. Copyright attorneys, labor attorneys, and immigration attorneys have different banks of knowledge and it is hardly feasible to keep them all on staff.

Outside general counsel services seem to be a growing option for many businesses. While large businesses may have a full time legal staff that is able to know the company and its inner workings intimately on a day-to-day basis, outside general counsel services shouldn’t be discredited. A business can pay a retainer fee to secure a lawyer for future cases or projects. General counsel services usually have a variety of lawyers with specialties to address your needs as problems or challenges arise. As you can imagine, hiring a lawyer on an hourly basis is much more cost effective than paying a small fortune for a full time staff member.

Furthermore, the quality of a lawyer on an outside general counsel website is just as credible (if not more so) as one that you would hire through traditional means. UpCounsel is a great example: their lawyers average 14 years of experience, are on average 60% more cost effective than a traditional law firm, they can complete your project three times faster since only lawyers who have time to dedicate to your project submit a proposal, and they were educated in some of the finest law schools including Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, and UC Berkeley.

There are some great alternatives for businesses to get quality legal services for a fraction of the price when using these types of resources. Just because you don’t have a lawyer on staff doesn’t mean you have to compromise on your legal counsel.

UpCounsel helps businesses and entrepreneurs hire great attorneys and save a lot of money with their on-demand legal work. By using the UpCounsel legal marketplace, businesses can get proposals from several vetted attorneys experienced with their specific legal needs and choose the attorney that is best for them and their budget.

Business Attorney, Business Lawyer