Pictured above: (l-r from bottom centre): Philippa
Dempster (in the purple dress), Freeth Cartwright; Chris Plumley,
Anthony Collins; Richard Barlow, Browne Jacobson; John McElvaney,
Derbyshire County Council; Anit Bradley, Mansfield District
Council; Heather Dickinson, Nottinghamshire County Council; Stuart
Leslie, Derby City Council; John Riddell, Weightmans; Peter Taylor,
DLA Piper
With only a matter of weeks to go before the Comprehensive
Spending Review is published, over 130 delegates from 50 different
local authorities in the East Midlands gathered at the EM LawShare
Conference last week to hammer out cost-effective methods of
reducing their legal spend.
The annual conference was held at the East Midlands Conference
Centre and is the second to be hosted by EM LawShare, a consortium
of 50 local authorities in the UK covering an area the size of
Belgium. It was the culmination of a programme of training and
other value-added services that a recently renewed panel of five
leading law firms has delivered to the member authorities.
The delegates, mostly in-house lawyers at local authorities,
gathered to hear how they could use the private firms' expertise to
complement their own legal offering at a reduced cost.
Chief executive of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club Derek
Brewer was welcomed as Key Note Speaker. He explained how the
benefits of partnership working had turned the fortunes of the club
around and urged delegates to embrace the model offered by the
Consortium:
"Through a tight partnership with local organisations, the Club
has achieved so much more than it could have done independently. I
understand that the same spirit of collaborative working is one of
the cornerstones of EM LawShare and I am confident that the
consortium will create similar successes for its members."
Jayne Francis-Ward, Assistant Chief Executive of Nottinghamshire
County Council and the architect of EM LawShare explained:
"The conference afforded a great opportunity for the partner
firms to showcase their expertise and win over those members who
haven't yet utilised the services of the panel."
With the pressure of spending cuts hanging over the public
sector, some expressed concerns as to how payment for the services
of the private partner law firms would help cut costs.
John Riddell, Partner in the Local Government team at Weightmans
law firm - one of the five partner firms - explained:
"The Consortium presents an opportunity to truly work in
partnership. Rather than signing over whole projects to the partner
firms, in-house legal teams can work with them to deliver quality
legal advice at the lowest possible cost.
"Under the partnership model EM LawShare promotes, in-house
lawyers can outsource a particular element of a project to just one
of the five partner firms that has the resources to complete it at
a competitive rate, or they can use the combined force of the five
law firms on a larger project. It's not a choice between cheaper
in-house work or packing off whole projects to private firms; the
collaborative model EM LawShare creates is much more flexible than
that."
Jayne said that feedback from delegates confirms that this model
is working for the member authorities:
"Feedback has been extremely encouraging so far; the
skills-based training that the partner firms provided was
particularly well received at a time when in-house training budgets
are likely to be slashed."