PwC Launches On-Demand Flexible Lawyering Service for Clients

PwC has launched a new flexible lawyering service as part of its ‘New Law’ offering for large in-house legal teams.

The new service, dubbed Flexible Legal Resources, will help clients with their staffing needs by providing temporary lawyers for in-house teams during abnormal spikes in workload.

PwC expects the service to be used by clients requiring increased resources for tasks such as large-scale contract review, disclosure exercises during investigations, and other implementation challenges driven by regulatory changes.

The service will initially focus on providing financial services, regulation, corporate, commercial, data protection and entity governance advice.

Flexible Legal Resources is part of PwC’s New Law offering, which aims to help large in-house legal teams work more efficiently, with a particular focus on effective use of technology.

PwC Legal services director Anne-Marie Botha said: “We are launching this now because we believe the legal services landscape has changed. Employees are demanding more flexibility, talent pools are shifting and technology is disrupting businesses. This means our clients need to find adaptable workforce solutions.

“Balance this with an ever-increasing regulatory environment and pressure to deliver more for less, the contingent workforce is an attractive option. It allows clients to ramp their legal teams up and down depending on changing business demand, gives them access to a rich talent pool, but still allows them to drive efficiencies in overheads.”

Botha added that the firm can already draw on “a strong talent pool across a range of legal specialisms”, with that staffing pool set to grow in tandem with client demand.

The news comes after PwC recruited Radiant Law partners Andrew Giverin and Jason McQuillen this April to help develop the New Law offering. Giverin and McQuillen were co-founders of Radiant, a fixed-fee firm that focuses on technology, outsourcing and managing large-scale contract review.

PwC recently launched a law firm in the US, in the latest evidence of the concerted push into legal services by the big four accounting firms. The firm, ILC Legal, which is based in Washington DC, will assist US clients on international issues and act as a marketing operation to generate work that can be referred to PwC’s existing legal services network.