Bill Gallagher argues companies should outsource legal work to focus on what they do best. His first company had 4-5 in-house lawyers and paralegals, but he later switched to one retained lawyer and outsourced the rest, avoiding the burden of managing legal specialists.
If a company can sit there and say, these are the four things that really define our business and what we want to be really good at, then that by itself tells you that maybe you shouldn't focus on anything else. I mean, you should be outsourcing stuff that is not a core competency. And that's what I decided for ourselves, going back sometime. In our very first company, we had 250 employees. We had almost a full legal firm. We had four or five attorneys. They all had paralegals. And I learned pretty quickly that I had no business to evaluate how a law firm was running. When attorneys would come to me and tell me how great they were and how much money they'd saved us, I would nod my head, but I wouldn't be able to know. Is that really true? Because it's not something I knew about. It wasn't a core competency for me. So in future companies. When I started the future companies, I just basically had one lawyer and outsourced the entire legal department.
