In-house legal teams need to move away from "transactional" interactions with law firms and build relationships based on trust, according to Barclays managing director and head of external engagement Stephanie Hamon.

Hamon was speaking at the CLOC London Institute 2019, the organisation's second UK gathering of in-house legal operations professionals, after the event launched in London last year.

Her remarks came on day two of the conference, in a session entitled 'From Cost Centre to Strategic Enabler', during which she focused on how lawyers can rediscover the value of trust.

She said: "When I started at Barclays, my GC told me that he wanted us to change the client-law firm dynamic. But you can't drive change if you don't drive relationships, so I decided to change my legal panel model from a transactional-based one to a relationship-based one."

Hamon said she uses various frameworks to measure the value that different law firms give to Barclays, and how efficiently each law firm delivers their services to the company.

She uses these measurements in discussions with her legal advisers on how they can improve working together. This in turn gives law firms the opportunity to demonstrate the value they believe they are giving to the company and to say what they feel they are getting out of the relationship.

"However, when we started with the relationship-based model," said Hamon, "we found there was a lack of trust in our existing relationships. Even some of the law firms we had been working with for decades didn't trust us completely. So how do you bring trust back into the relationship? The problem came down to the fact that our expectations of our key law firms were never really properly articulated and feedback on those [was not] provided candidly."

This trust can be re-established through more conversations between law firms and their clients, greater transparency, and the sharing of ideas and data, she explained.

Meanwhile, during a separate panel discussion on 'Creating and Maximising the Value of a Legal Ops Function In a Rapidly Changing Legal Ecosystem', former Royal Mail GC Maaike de Bie encouraged law firms to pick up the phone and talk to their clients more often.

De Bie, who is joining Easyjet as GC this March, said: "Lawyers are afraid to fail and afraid to make mistakes, so they always feel they have to come to us with ready-made answers. This in turn means that when they see a change on the horizon, they rarely just pick up the phone and have a conversation about the issues this change may mean for us, and how they as a law firm may be able to help think it through with us."

De Bie was joined on the panel by WW Legal Operations vice-president and deputy general counsel Aine Lyons, and Sky deputy group general counsel Vicky Sandry.

While talking about the much-touted rise of the legal operations function, the trio also discussed the need to evolve legal culture.

Sandry said: "At Sky, we've got an objective to work smarter not harder, because we can't work any harder. It's about trusting people so they can work in ways that best work for them and for the business. This means having a strong flexible-working system that recognises trust."