Who are Pinsent Masons Vario?
This summer, Pinsent Masons Vario celebrates it’s 10 year anniversary, so what better time to reflect on who we are today after our journey over the last decade. What started out as a flexible staffing resource for legal teams has now evolved into one of the most diverse ALSP offerings in the marketplace. The Flexible Services provision is now complemented by offerings of Managed Legal Services, Client Consulting & Technology, Legal Project Management and Company Secretarial Services.
For those less familiar with what each service offering comprises, our anniversary provides the perfect opportunity to clarify and re-define who we are and what we have to offer to clients.
What are Flexible Legal Services?
Vario's Flexible Services offering provides qualified legal professionals tailored to a clients’ specific needs. Our consultants are commercially savvy as well as technical experts making them the perfect solution for staffing shortages. However, the service line has now developed beyond a staffing solution for ad-hoc secondment support. Today it manifests as a large scale, multi-jurisdictional, outsource in-house legal resource, supporting an increasing volume and complexity of client needs.
Our bench operates across a range of jurisdictions from the UK and Ireland to Germany and the Asia Pacific Region. We have recently welcomed our 2,000th member to the hub which is comprised of legal professional of all manners including GCs, paralegals, HR consultants and forensic accountants.
What are Managed Legal Services?
Our Managed Legal Services offering takes away day-to-day tasks to let clients focus on high value legal work. Increasingly, there is a concern amongst GCs that their legal teams are becoming saturated with low value work. In turn, this then takes away from the ability to undertake and crucially bill higher values and complexities of work.
How do they operate? The team take a holistic view to the service offering and look to utilise both legal technology and a process-driven mindset to help clients complete tasks in a faster, better and cheaper way. Key to the operation of the service line is its Paralegal Centre of Excellence. This looks to assign top quality paralegals to client projects to ensure that work is not only better allocated but completed to the highest of standards.
What is Client Consulting & Legal Technology?
There is a clear and obvious overlap between the Managed Legal Services offering and the Client Consulting & Technology offering. This is a conscious business decision because each has qualities that complement the other. The key focus of the latter is to make sure that projects are led by solutions and not only by technology.
Our consultancy process identifies inefficiencies and allows us to implement processes and technology that actually add value to clients. Built into this consulting process is our Lean Six Sigma team, who look to eliminate inefficiencies, but also remove variation by following a data-driven methodology. The combination of these offerings is something that is far from the norm within the legal profession.
What is Legal Project Management?
Vario’s Legal Project Management offering follows a simple but accurate precedent, lawyers are best suited to performing legal work. This sounds obvious, but the reality is that many lawyers (in particular the more senior they become) find that a large amount of their time is taken up with strategic and or operational matters beyond doing legal work.
By putting a project manager in place, we allow legal professionals to focus on providing an exceptional legal service instead of the logistics of an operation. Their role is a combination of keeping projects and budgets on track, liaising with parties (be they clients, legal teams oer internal teams) and general business development.
What are Company Secretarial Services (Co-Sec)?
Our Co-Sec offering is the most recently added feather to Vario’s cap. Vario's Company Secretarial offering assists Clients with the management of their entities in a compliant, efficient, and visible manner. They remove the burden and confusion to allow you to focus on business success.
The creation, governance and management of legal entities is a time-consuming, labour-intensive, and at times technically demanding activity. This is particularly the case when operating cross-border businesses, where the local regulations can differ greatly from one jurisdiction to another. To help our clients cope with this, we offer our services both domestically within the UK and internationally and utilise Pinsent Masons 26 international offices in doing so.
With our first 10 years behind us, we’re looking forward to expanding further over the course of the next decade. Who knows what our service offering will look like in 2033.