Liance and Legal Manager on the growing demand for outsourcing: “We complement each other very nicely”

More and more opportunities on one side, more and more rules on the other. Keeping legal work on track can be remarkably difficult. Liance director Lisette Hendrikse sees the demand for outsourcing growing, and is glad to join forces with the experts at Legal Manager.

After a legal career at several companies, Hendrikse entered into a new partnership with two associates in 2015. The result was an “outsourced legal department,” set up to take the pressure off internationally scaling start-ups, larger mid-market companies and the life sciences sector, covering both hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry. “When we started, that was genuinely unfamiliar territory. Business owners would bring in a separate specialist for every subject, when the whole problem is how impractical it is to coordinate with that many different people. An in-house lawyer is the logical answer instead of all those different experts. But can one person really be a specialist in every area? As General Counsel, I always had an entire team of experts to fall back on.”

Liance caught on quickly and has continued to expand in recent years. When Legal Manager was founded in 2019, the two firms clicked almost immediately. “I recognized exactly what they were focusing on,” Hendrikse says. “I had often struggled myself with start-ups trying to professionalize. There is usually someone behind them with a compelling vision, who is also a little chaotic because everything has to happen at once. What you end up missing is something like a system to manage contracts comfortably and securely. That also makes it harder to bring investors on board.”

Strong partners

From day one, Legal Manager proved to be a good partner for serving clients well. Hendrikse calls it working “in tandem.” “We still speak every week to align on things and discuss new possibilities. We can turn to each other with specific questions. For any fast-growing company, I bring Jan-Willem in to make sure everything is in order. In turn, we get called in for substantive legal questions. So we complement each other very nicely.”

That collaboration also creates opportunities for staff. “Legal Manager is a very good place to learn how contracts work. Young lawyers who have spent a few years with Jan-Willem have the chance to move on to Liance. That works really well. In the future we even want to work together more closely.”

Plenty is set to happen in legal services over the coming years in any case. Hendrikse names AI technology as the first example. “We are currently building an AI agent to speed up the simple work. If you do not get on board now, you will fall behind everyone else. It is also simply a good thing for shared models to emerge, so that not everyone has to invent everything separately. On the other hand, you really do need to know where your information comes from and which models you are using. If a business owner is working from a collaboration agreement when what they actually need is a purchase agreement, you are not getting anywhere.”

ESG reports

“You can also see that new legislation is stirring things up,” Hendrikse continues. “Take reporting obligations, for instance, which keep increasing, particularly around environmental impact. All those ESG reports are getting a standard format, but you can see that companies do not know where to start. Legal Manager could grow into that area very effectively. It is changing for us too. There is far more demand for steward ownership now, for example. How do you embed that? At the same time, you see very different movements coming out of American industry. The picture keeps getting more complex.”

All these developments can have consequences inside a company, Hendrikse explains. “It is becoming harder to get anything done with a small department. So you see a growing need for a flexible team that knows what it is doing and can provide support across the board. Experts who make sure you meet your reporting obligations, for example. I think that kind of outsourcing is only going to become more important.