Challenge Group - Setting up or Developing a Specialist Legal Advice Service
How do we build or develop a specialist legal advice service that is needed, viable, compliant and genuinely integrated into our organisation?
The Specialist Legal Advice Challenge Group convenes 12–18 people with a shared interest in setting up a specialist legal advice service or evolving an existing service to become more specialist. It is a community of interest for people facing similar challenges, working together to co-create practical responses, share learning and make progress in their own organisations.
You will work alongside others facing similar decisions, bringing your own experience and learning from theirs. Through peer challenge, practical tools and facilitated discussion, you will test your thinking and develop realistic plans for a new service or the next stage of an existing one.
The work will be a process of guided co-creation. Together, participants will agree the questions they want to work through and the useful outputs they want to produce. Jayne Butler will be the subject matter expert in the room, bringing specialist knowledge and helping the group challenge assumptions and develop practical responses. Facilitation may move between group members from session to session, as agreed by the group.
Through the work together, you should develop a much better-tested plan and be able to answer three fundamental questions:
1. Should we do this?
2. Can we do this well?
3. What would it take to make it sustainable?
Who it is for
The group is open to 12–18 participants from organisations that:
are seriously considering or actively planning to set up a specialist legal advice service, or develop an existing service to become more specialist
have identified at least a broad area of law or client need they want to address
have important decisions still open about the service they want to establish or develop
have senior leadership and trustee awareness of the proposal
are willing to share and test their assumptions about demand, delivery, capacity and finances with the group
Participants should be CEOs, Directors or senior managers who have sufficient organisational influence to take the work forward and can commit to contributing regularly to the group and its shared work.
You do not need to arrive with all the answers. In fact, the group is designed to help you find them. But you do need to arrive with a live organisational challenge or proposition that you are prepared to question, test and develop.
This is a challenge group: the purpose is not to convince each other that our plans are good ideas, but to help each other work out what it would take to make them work.
The first session convenes on Tuesday 24th November online at 10am-12noon.
The group will set dates together and meet monthly over the next 6 months.