The status quo at handover

The pattern is the same in almost every house: a matter goes out, and the legal department first assembles a package — contracts from the shared drive, mail threads from several mailboxes, notes held by whoever handled it. What arrives is a PDF collection of “the relevant documents”, often inconsistently named and rarely complete.

The receiving side reconstructs the facts from that, asks for the missing contracts and checks deadlines the package never mentioned. That reconstruction lands on your invoice — the most expensive hours of the mandate, spent producing knowledge your house already held.

The outside adviser as a matter collaborator

Instead of packaging documents, you release the matter. Outside advisers can be invited into your system as external collaborators — on an access that denies everything by default and opens only the matter explicitly assigned to them. In practice that means:

  • The invitation is issued for a specific matter or contract. Without that assignment, the external account sees nothing.
  • Visible are the facts, linked documents, correspondence and deadlines — of that matter, not of the rest of your portfolio.
  • There is no fallback to department-wide or tenant-wide visibility: no other matters, no contact list, no reporting.
  • When the mandate closes you end the access in one step; assignments are released and the action is recorded in the audit trail.

What this changes for your house

Outside counsel starts from a prepared matter rather than a shoebox. The first hour goes into the substantive question you engaged them for, not into reconstruction. And because the access is narrow and ends with the mandate, the handover stays clean in data-protection terms: no body of data leaves your house beyond the engagement.

Prepared files instead of shoeboxes

This presupposes the matter is in a handover-ready state to begin with — which is simply the daily work in the system: incoming PDFs are captured by OCR, given metadata and assigned to the right matter; contracts sit versioned with deadlines and parties; correspondence hangs on the matter instead of in a personal mailbox. Handover then stops being a project and becomes a release.

What it saves in external hours

The scarce resource here is not your own time but the external fee. When onboarding per mandate is shorter because the facts arrive structured, the share of the budget spent on reconstruction falls and the share spent on the actual question rises.

The second lever sits earlier: the more standard work your house handles itself — dunning notices, simple terminations, contract reviews against clear clause requirements — the less often anything needs to go out at all. More under Features.

What stays in house — and what does not

The division of labour does not shift because of the system. Representation in pending proceedings, litigation strategy and legal responsibility for the mandate sit with the external firm; that is their job and stays theirs. LEGALinhouse is a working tool for your legal department: it structures the matter, prepares documents and produces drafts and research for review by your own staff. It does not provide legal services and does not replace advice. More under Concept · RDG and limits.

Want to set up handover to your external advisers this way? Request beta access — we set up your legal department and guide the first matter release to an external firm.