Donna Sewell (Founder and CEO of Legal Edge) highlights why it is so important for fast-growth businesses to have a legal budget and strategy.

Hi, I’m Donna Sewell, Founder and CEO of Legal Edge. I want to talk to you about why it’s so important for fast-growth businesses to have a legal budget and strategy.

We get it that legal is not the most exciting part of the business because it’s not considered to be a revenue-generating function. But if you don’t have a legal budget or strategy in place when something does go wrong, like a disgruntled employee trying to sue you, or a client who refuses to pay, it could end up costing you huge amounts of money and management time, which could have been avoided.

So, how do you avoid wasting time and money? And how do you get your legal house in order? Well, first you need to think differently. Think of legal as part of your ops team. Don’t treat it as an afterthought. Set the tone from the top of the organization that legal is important and valued in your business. Second, have a legal budget, strategy, and a plan that’s designed to protect your assets as well as drive your revenue. Think about the business milestones you have coming up, like you might be raising money or you might be entering new markets, or releasing new products or services, and make sure your legal strategy helps you to achieve those objectives. Be aware of the key risks to your business and put in place a plan to deal with them before they become an issue. Some prep time will help minimize those nasty expensive surprises. Do you have the right legal support to help you? A lawyer or a legal team with good in-house experience and a commercial approach is critical. They can help you to understand what you need to worry about and what you don’t. And you need to have legal as a line item in your budget and you and your lawyer or legal team need to manage it and stick to it.

Finally, look at your processes. Do they make it easy for you to do business? Do your customer contracts work, can they get closed out quickly and effectively? Ineffective contracts will slow down your sales cycle and reduce revenue growth. Whilst bad or unprofitable deals cost you money, and management time. So what should a good legal function do in practice? Well, the right lawyer should work with your business functions, from sales to marketing, IT, HR,  facilities and finance, and look and identify any red flags, any high-risk deals, or projects that are starting to go wrong and so on. Check whether you have processes in place to deal with them. Then your lawyer should help you to prioritize what you need to tackle according to the likely impact and level of risk to your business. Spending some time being proactive by identifying areas of concern and setting up processes to deal with them, and managing those priority issues will help you to avoid expensive crisis’. And legal budgets, well, they vary depending on many factors such as whether you’re in a regulated industry, the stage and size of your business, and the type of customers you deal with.

But for all businesses, it’s crucial to have a legal line item in your budget. Otherwise legal will never be proactively managed and you’re likely to keep getting those nasty and expensive surprises. A good in-house lawyer will help you to set the right legal budget and stick to it. Ultimately, a bit of proactive management of legal will help you to grow your business faster whilst managing risk, and keeping spending in check. So, our advice is to stop thinking of legal, as a necessary evil or distress purchase and start viewing it as an enabler to growth.

Donna is LegalEdge’s CEO, on a mission to bring affordable in-house legal services in all tech and media scale-ups. LegalEdge is a practical, affordable legal solution for growing companies. They set up a cost-effective and efficient legal function (people, processes, tech) working as part of your operations team. With an experienced lawyer as you single point of contact, they analyse risk and prioritise what’s important and help decide what you need (and don’t need) to worry about.