As Local Authority News reports, thirteen districts in Essex have joined the county council to form a new partnership to provide legal services.
The context is that all public services face a major challenge in the years ahead, as resources become scarcer – and local government will feel this as acutely as any.
Essex Legal Services Partnership has created a new model for local government services, which enables the teams to improve services to clients and communities. The new way of working provides a ‘virtual’ team approach, with each council maintaining its own legal experts yet pooling resources to meet client needs, continually develop learning, and reducing the demand for external legal firms to meet capacity gaps.
The question - Is this the most creative way for say, local authorties to deal with their legal fees and reduce them?
Centralistion is certainly an attractive proposition in the quest to reduce legal fees and share resouces, and local autorities need to conisder if there are any alternative ways of saving costs.
By introducing greater use of internal mediation to manage internal employment disputes; this can be an attractive way to cut the Employment Tribunal costs. This is something which my firm has worked with a leading Council to reduce the costs of internal disputes.
Another positive way is to train the relevant internal legal staff on the uses of mediation and negotiation. This gives satff much greater confidence in the ability to resolve disputes.
Local authorties should look at their contractual arranagements and consider whether they can include mediation/ADR clauses to maximise use of dispute resolution.
The key objective in all this is to look at not the cost savings by pooling together but addressing the mindset....The investment does pay.