A legal advisor is the business partner and trusted advisor of the company. They must be the right hand of the CEO or manager who, by consulting every decision with the legal advisor, will ensure safe and effective steps are taken in the development of the company. The legal advisor helps prevent breaches by the company regarding current legislation in various fields. Thus, they must support the company in negotiating, drafting, and reviewing contracts, advising relationships with its stakeholders such as consumers, employees, and clients. Generally, they must align legal tools with the business strategy and projection of the company to enhance its growth.

Legal consultancy is responsible for protecting the interests of the company through legal management and, if thought of strategically, can become a business partner that will enable the enhancement of the company’s growth. Since the law regulates most corporate actions, it is present in almost all dimensions of companies. Therefore, legal consultancy must be vigilant and constantly analyze the company’s relationships, both internal (with its employees, for example) and external (with its clients, contractors, and other business relationships). Depending on the sector of the company, the legal advisor must ensure compliance with various specific regulations applicable to the company due to the nature of the products or services it provides or the type of business relationships it has. For instance, if the company is involved in the local marketing and export of garments, the legal consultancy must consider the Andean technical regulation for garment labeling to comply internally, but also oversee export processes to comply with customs legislation, and in business relationships, consider the intricacies of international contracts, among others. In this sense, the legal consultancy must be involved in all dimensions of the company to ensure compliance with all applicable regulations, identify and mitigate legal risks in a timely manner, and enhance the company’s growth through the use of legal tools that align with the business vision and projection.

Besides ensuring the correct compliance with internal and external regulations and protecting the interests of the company, legal advice should enhance its growth by accompanying strategic decisions of companies, offering attractive and efficient options and solutions through legal tools such as contracts, legal opinions, and other general legal strategies. Moreover, legal advice should be able to identify legal risks and mitigate them preventively to prevent the company from incurring unnecessary costs.

Most traditional firms set their rates based on the hours devoted to the project, having different rates according to the role of the lawyers involved and performing a count that may seem eternal from the clients’ perspective. They may also base their rates on reference to CONALBOS, which is a tariff issued by the Bar Association but is not always consistent with the work actually performed, or even in the worst-case scenario, some firms sadly set rates based on “the face of the client”. At Top Lawyers, we work with legal innovation methodologies, which allow us to standardize our techniques and internal processes, enabling us to adopt a pricing structure that allows us to charge objectively and without any differentiation, consistent with our New Law business model, focused on delivering competitive products to the market, with added value and at reasonable prices.

International contracts have certain characteristics that have a significant legal and economic impact on companies. Legal advisors play a crucial role in clearly identifying the presence of an international contract through the analysis of the contract’s contact points, as it is not always evident that a contract should be created or managed as an international one. Additionally, at the international level, there are risks of law conflicts (when more than two legislations are applicable to the same case) or jurisdiction conflicts (when more than two judges are competent to decide), among others. These risks must be identified and mitigated by legal advisors from the negotiation and drafting of contracts, including clauses of international implication that benefit the company’s interests. For example, an applicable law clause can be included, specifying the law under which any dispute arising from the contract will be governed, strategically chosen so as not to incur additional costs for the company due to the ignorance of new legislation. Lastly, there are contracts that are being standardized internationally, i.e., contracts that are used more or less with the same clauses in various countries and are compliant with different jurisdictions, such as NDAs or confidentiality agreements and SLAs (Service Level Agreements). Legal advisors should then recognize these types of standardized contracts and manage them perfectly to ensure business fluidity and the company’s protection on the international stage.

Legal advisors handle Due Diligence in merger and acquisition operations. In this way, they analyze the risks that arise at the legal level for the companies involved in the operation and make visible the viability and opportunity of the operation to enhance the company’s growth or change its competitive position within the market.

Legal Design is integrated into the drafting of a contract through Legal Design Thinking or LDT, which is a project management methodology from the world of design. LDT has 5 phases: In the first phase, we create an empathy map of the end-users of the contract or document. That is, we get to know in detail those who will read and sign the contract. This map allows us to understand the context surrounding the contract, whether economic, social, or cultural, in addition to, of course, the legal implications around it, as well as the viewpoint of each of the parties. The second phase involves synthesizing the information; here we propose the essential aspects that should be present within the contract we are designing, then we move on to the third phase called prototyping. In the prototyping, we assemble our contract with the clauses that will be most relevant to give life to the legal business in the most effective way possible. Next, we go through a first translation where we identify complex and difficult-to-understand legal terminology and practices for non-lawyers. This stage is the most demanding because we must handle all the legal intricacies perfectly and then explain them in easy-to-understand language without losing their legal validity and effectiveness. Then, we test the said document. In this fourth phase, we receive feedback from people similar to the end-users, who read the document and tell us what they understood. This allows us to identify flaws in the language that may lead to confusion or misunderstanding of the text. Finally, based on the feedback, we evolve our prototype! We change those terms that lend themselves to confusion and perform a final legal scan to be more than sure that our contract complies with all current legislation and also protects the legal interests of our client. And voilà! A contract that is easy to understand, effective, and satisfactory!

According to Larry Ribstein in his article “The Dead of Big Law,” New Law arises in opposition to Big Law, which is understood as the traditional law firm business model based, among other things, on its reputation and hourly billing. This business structure is seen as economically unviable because it does not offer the market any added value beyond the recognition and reputation of the firms (or their partners), and it generates high costs for clients, who do not know in advance how much they will pay until the final calculation of hours worked is completed, often exceeding their budget.

When we talk about New Law, we refer to an economically viable business model, being a competitive model that offers legal products to the market with added value and a differential factor, which allows clients to make informed decisions when hiring a legal service.

In this sense, at Top Lawyers, we are characterized by being New Law, as we have a business model in which we offer the market:

Differential factors: We include in all our services methodologies of Legal Design and Preventive Risk Management, aiming to optimize the legal dimension of your company so that it aligns with your business strategy and supports its growth, while avoiding unnecessary costs.

Added value: We become your trusted advisors and business partners, being by your side in every corporate decision in order to optimize and boost the growth of your company, and committing to reducing costs associated with legal management.

Pricing: We do NOT bill by the hour. All our services are packaged as commodities, offering products with prices determinable in advance of the consultation. We have a pricing scheme that allows us to precisely determine our costs and expenses in each project, hence our proposals contain fixed values. With Top Lawyers, there are no surprises with additional fees!