Fast-growing Anglo-Australian alternative legal service provider Lawyers on Demand (LOD) has already met with success as a legal industry disruptor, but now it aims to become a "one-stop shop" for in-house legal teams by making its work product understandable and accessible to corporate executives who are not lawyers.

"Ten years ago, [in-house legal departments] only had the option of farming work out to law firms or doing it themselves, and now they've got lots of different options," LOD co-founder Ken Jagger said in an interview with Law.com International. "We're trying to play into that space."

The company, which falls into a category that is frequently referred to as "new law," came about through the 2016 merger of Lawyers on Demand in the U.K., founded by Simon Harper, and AdventBalance, founded by Perth-based Jagger, which provided a similar service in major Australian cities and in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Since that merger, LOD has rapidly expanded both geographically and in the services it provides. The company, which is owned by management and private equity firm Bowmark Capital, posted revenue of £50 million ($65.3 million) in the last financial year and Jagger said it expects to see revenue grow at more than 20% a year.

Ken Jagger.

Jagger, who was previously a partner with the firm Freehills (now Herbert Smith Freehills), said this success stems from the fact that in-house teams continue to seek economical alternatives to traditional law firms.

Indeed, a report published last week by Acritas said more than one-third of corporations are now turning to alternative legal services providers for legal tasks. The report also said the ALSP market is growing by 12.9% a year, with larger ALSPs expecting growth to reach 24% a year, posing one of the main external challenges to existing law firms.

While Lawyers on Demand started as a secondment business of corporate legal departments and that remains the core of the business, the company has expanded into three new offerings as it tries to provide more services to current clients.

It has launched an innovation and design team, which provides legal operations and legal tech for corporate clients.

It also has created a managed services group that involves teams of lawyers undertaking projects and business-as-usual work using process and technology to deliver it more efficiently. Essentially, it undertakes complete pieces of work for corporate clients and completes them externally.

Finally, there is LOD Legal, which Jagger describes as an extension of the secondment business. Rather than sending lawyers out on secondment, lawyers from LOD Legal carry out the work externally using experienced in-house lawyers who understand what commercial clients want.

"With the LOD Legal product, we're really trying to be just a natural extension of the in-house team, which they can flex up or flex down as required," he said.

The LOD Legal service was launched in Australia in 2017 but expanded into the U.K. last month after the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) introduced its new standards and regulations that enable individual solicitors in England and Wales to deliver services more as freelancers, without being subject to full regulation that the SRA previously required.

Jagger said the company hires former in-house lawyers who know what it is to work in-house and so deliver a product that is digestible to nonlawyers within the business. Lawyers on Demand's "crucial difference" is that it delivers a product that doesn't have to be reinterpreted by the client's in-house team for a non-legal audience within their business.

"Law firms continue to provide long, written advice about the facts of the law 'could be this, could be that,' whereas if you worked in-house, that's just not what the in-house client needs," he said. "We're trying to create something that is a one-stop shop for these in-house teams."

With LOD Legal, Lawyers on Demand is aiming to provide in-house teams with external flexibility to go along with the internal flexibility the secondment business provides, Jagger said.

"We want to be able to solve all of our clients' problems, so we started with secondments," he continued. "But that's only solving one problem. That only solves the need for flexibility in their teams and workforce."

Even before launching the in-house service in the U.K., demand for the service provided by LOD Legal had been increasing, as midtier firms that used to undertake this sort of bread-and-butter work were hollowed out. It has been operating in Australia for three years and in New Zealand for one.

"We're really concentrating on that 80-90% of work that corporate in-house teams have, the business-as-usual, so they can concentrate on the higher value work within their own business," Jagger said.

Lawyers on Demand now has two offices each in New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates and Germany. The company opened its second German office—in Düsseldorf — in January.

Even law firms are now trying to tap into the demand for help from in-house teams and have started their own secondment-style businesses. Allen & Overy, for example, has set up Peerpoint; Linklaters launched Re:link last year; and Pinsent Masons has Vario.

While Lawyers on Demand continues to seek new clients and is open to moving into new locations, the short- and medium-term opportunity it is pursuing is to expand the services it provides to its current clients, Jagger said.

It currently employs about 850 attorneys—including its secondment lawyers. They are roughly split 40% in Australia, 40% in the U.K. and the remaining 20% in other jurisdictions.

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