Managing the legal workload with Law Squared as a Service
AusNet Services is an Australian energy delivery services business, owning and operating more than $11 billion of electricity and gas network assets. It owns and operates the Victorian electricity transmission network, an electricity distribution network and a gas distribution network. It’s one of five electricity distributors and one of three gas distributors in Victoria.
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The AusNet legal team has a wide variety of complex works it needs to manage on a day-to-day basis. This means they are very reliant on each of their lawyers to easily pick up tasks that match their skill sets and then work autonomously with the business to achieve a positive outcome.
In late 2020, the in-house legal team at AusNet identified that they needed help with the volume of work that was coming in. Ideally, AusNet wanted to recruit a person for the role but knew that this would take some time.
While the business had made a commitment to spend time on the recruitment process, the work didn’t stop coming through to the legal team. AusNet needed short-term support from a generalist commercial lawyer who would be able to hit the ground running and take some of the pressure off the in-house team.
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AusNet spoke with Law Squared about its LSaaS model and ultimately engaged Law Squared to support its in-house team for three months.
After an initial onboarding meeting, Law Squared seamlessly integrated themselves into the AusNet legal team and business. Law Squared attended a weekly meeting with the team where work was delivered, allocated and discussed. The AusNet team quickly had confidence in Law Squared’s work and was then able to step back and let Law Squared work directly with various business units such as the Procurement Team. This allowed the AusNet in-house team to work on bigger picture, more strategic items of work.
The relationship evolved from a two-day per week engagement to a flexible arrangement where the engagement would either dial up or dial down depending on the amount of work that the AusNet in-house team needed support with at that time. It was as simple as quickly briefing the relationship manager on the work that needed to be done before it was actioned in a timely manner by a member of the Law Squared team. Law Squared was able to assist on urgent pieces, such as a Services Agreement review, or bigger projects, such as reviewing and updating AusNet’s precedent documents.
While generally an LSaaS engagement revolves around the commercial aspects of a business, LSaaS clients also have access to all four of Law Squared’s legal teams. This was useful for AusNet when it received an insurance claim came that was outside of its regular wheelhouse. The LSaaS relationship manager was able to brief the Disputes + Litigation Team and have them assist, ultimately gaining a positive outcome for AusNet.
“I was literally able to get an email from the business, forward it onto the Law Squared team, give them a paragraph or two of background on it and then they would go away and do it – the transition during that handover was absolutely seamless and the work that they did was of an extremely high standard.”
- Tyson Carruthers, Managing Counsel at AusNet Services.