The Legal Risk Map®

Most companies (rightly) focus on operational delivery. The danger of focusing on the task too much, without taking care of the supporting processes, is that:

• Hard-earned profits can disappear
• The company can become open to litigation
• Staff fail to understand the company processes
• Reputations can be irretrievably damaged.

As ever, there needs to be balance across a company’s activities to get the ‘tail to teeth’ ratio just right.

We have found that among other ‘tail’ activities, such as logistics or HR, the legal aspects tend to be overlooked. This can be because legal language can be impenetrable, there is a fear of cost and there is a perception that ‘legals’ are not required – ‘if we don’t mess up, we don’t need legals’.

Each of these views can be valid, but the ‘do nothing’ option comes with risk.

We have designed the legal risk mapping service to remove the guesswork from this part of your operations.

As ever with risk, once it has been identified it can then be mitigated or accepted for what it is; the crucial first stage, though, is to identify the risk and that’s what our legal risk mapping process does.

We will ask you about your business, about your services and about any goods that you supply. Once we have reviewed everything, we will provide you with a legal risk map, showing where you are in relatively good shape and where we believe you may be carrying risk. We also provide a prioritised work plan to mitigate any risks we have identified.

The time and cost of the legal risk map depends on how deep you want us to go. Our free legal risk map takes an hour of your time (and about a day of ours) and provides an overview of your situation. You may decide that you want a fully detailed map or that you want us to focus on certain areas; in either of those cases, once we understand a little about you we will charge a set flat fee.

Of course you don’t have to act on our advice. We would say, though, be wary of cherry-picking the parts you like and ignoring the ones you don’t (or seem to be ‘too hard to do’) as you could create more problems than solutions. We will distinguish where we are pointing out a statutory requirement from where we suggest good practice.

No. Whilst at the initial stage we are not providing legal advice, it is an assessment of your current situation and we will treat all of our correspondence as confidential. We would never divulge details of our correspondence to a third party. If, following the initial stage, you ask us to deal with the areas highlighted you may be entitled to legal professional privilege.

You don’t have to use us as there is absolutely no obligation attached to the risk map. We do, though, believe we are best placed to help companies in our areas of specialisation. Another law firm is unlikely to just take our views without checking themselves, which means more time and expenditure for you.

This is quite understandable but rest assured the purpose is not to cause embarrassment, it’s to make sure you are set up (legally) for success. There are an army of law and regulatory requirements that even the best structured companies don’t know about or just don’t do very well. You are rightly focused on the delivery of your goods or services, let us focus on your legal infrastructure. Also rest assured that we immediately delete your information if you do not wish to give us instructions afterwards.