The REPH Legal team in Manila is going from strength to strength – made up of 6 paralegals, supervised by another lawyer, the UK Legal team has been supported since 2014 and James Harper and Blair Macdonald have been training and working with the team over this time.
Keen to capitalise on this, Blair has been working behind the scenes to introduce direct access to the REPH team for our UK business colleagues. The principle behind this is “right-source” your legal support – by transitioning some of the ‘everyday’ workload and enabling direct access, we can increase the availability of the onshore team for the more complex questions and advice (and therefore speed up average overall delivery across all work).
This process has already started; with licensing contracts the UK business will be given direct access to the REPH Legal team. The Legal Licensing function now deals directly with the legal professionals in Manila for all first line queries, document amendments and some legal advice. This represents a major benefit for our internal customers as it effectively doubles the number of staff who can review and respond to your queries.
The News and Business licensing in team will follow suit in May 2016. Thereafter, we will be adding the Author Licensing teams before rolling out further into the various legal and tax markets teams later in the year.
This is a major development for the legal team and the culmination of planning, training and engagement going back to 2104. As the REPH Legal team further develop their skills and expertise, they will become ever more accustomed to supporting all areas of the business and we will be able to further leverage their support. This should, in turn, drive down overall turnaround times across the varied work types we assist on!
We would welcome any suggestions for other areas to focus on that you would find most helpful, and are also delighted to hear from any volunteers to represent their teams to ensure they have more options for legal support! Contact blair.macdonald@lexisnexis.co.uk or james.harper@lexisnexis.co.uk or come up to L8 to see one of us!