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The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) have showcased a few methods that they used to create value in their legal team. These methods have had a significant impact on the ability of RBS’ in-house legal team to create value and can be used as food for thought when trying to create value across your legal teams.

Watch this short two-minute video with Leigh Kirkpatrick, Managing Legal Counsel for the Royal Bank of Scotland, to find out how they have successfully created value by focusing on using human-centred design to review their end-to-end contracting process, allowing the business to realise the benefits of these contracts much more quickly. 

What three methods have the Royal Bank of Scotland’s legal team used to help the business get more value from their contracts?

1. Shorten the length of the template agreement: Interrogating every sentence to see what is essential and if the provision is needed
2. Reduce points of friction: Understanding complex clauses and using the Behavioural Economics team to simplify and explain this to their suppliers
3. Simplify the legal design: Assessing the order and layout of clauses to make them more palatable and easier to negotiate

These three methods have effectively helped the Royal Bank of Scotland’s legal team create value. It supports the findings from our Value Report, where 95% of in-house lawyers stated that reduction in legal risk directly contributes to delivering value to their organisation. Gone are the days of straightforward tick-box compliance a more proactive, business-oriented approach to legal management is emerging.

“In-house counsel must think about law and risk in a way that the rest of the business thinks about it. That is in the context of numbers and finding solutions.”

Read more: what steps can your in-house legal team take to increase value?

How do I start to create value across my legal team?

Lawyers’ time can be a rarity and it is often difficult to know where to start and what needs to be done to create value. Here at ��˾����ҹ����, we have identified five key starting points to address in order to create value for your business. 

1. Being a skilled lawyer: There has been a shift in what makes a skilled in-house lawyer with more focus put on understanding the organisation and the commercial environments of which it operates in
   
2. Reducing the cost-of-service delivery: Reducing the cost-of-service delivery has been frequently found to add value. Most performance management and KPIs are based on this model and allows lawyers to do as much as they can for as little cost possible
   
3. Providing a service that reduces the organisation’s loss of profit margin: To non-legal stakeholders providing a legal service for as little cost possible can be one of their main aims. However, saving costs through effective commercial dealings or dispute management may be something for your legal teams to focus on to create value.
   
4. Providing a service that contributes to greater overall value of organisational service: Having a good quality technical solution may be overlooked by non-legal professionals, nevertheless this is an underrated way to create value within an organisation
   
5. Providing the corporate legal conscience - ‘The Ethical Champion‘:&�Բ�����;Providing an ethical steer to executive decisions and instilling a moral compass within the corporate ethos can be hugely beneficial for creating value.

Reducing margin loss

Creating value surpasses simply providing legal services at the lowest cost. It’s about generating outcomes where larger costs are saved, usually by safeguarding the company and its commercial interests by protecting its reputation and effectively managing legal risk.

To find out more on how your legal team can create value download the latest report here.