Focus on: is it beneficial to have an in-house legal department or an in-house lawyer?

The answer is simply yes; the knowledge of the company from the inside is invaluable and irreplaceable. This explains why over time, companies have decided to opt for the implementation of in-house legal departments.

These in-house legal departments can function as real law firms, with the added value of a thorough knowledge of the internal business. They oversee all the company’s legal matters and can become very efficient if they are managed correctly, thus contributing positively to the compliance with the regulatory framework that governs them.

Internal legal management must be transversal to the organisation, intervening in its different processes (clients, commercial contracts, suppliers, contractors, labour relations, among others), and must adjust its work to the company’s requirements. To this end, legal departments must align their strategies to the objectives of each line of business, managing agile and fast solutions that allow them to adapt to the turns of each situation and to the regulatory changes that occur, as well as to support their work with technological tools to optimise their processes and to make their resources efficient.

In my experience, the implementation of an internal legal department is of vital importance for organisations, since they allow analysis that fits the company, according to the type of business. Furthering this, the normative regulation that governs its activity allows the adequate development of corporate projects and brings legal services closer to the different areas of the company, something that does not happen with external services, since outsourcing makes the legal relationship more impersonal.

In addition, the correct implementation of an “in-house” legal team allows for the preventive management of risk analysis and, consequently, the maintenance of an adequate cost control.