Recently a number of our clients have entered into retainer agreements and we have been discussing this option for engaging us with a number of other clients as well.

A bespoke legal retainer arrangement is an efficient and cost-effective strategy that provides access to a team of qualified and highly skilled lawyers, each with professional specialisations that are critical for successful businesses.

The options are varied and flexible and may include capped rates and hours, be all-inclusive or any number of in between hybrids.

Retainer agreements are not locked in. If the arrangement is not working for either party we simply revert to other, more traditional models, such as a fixed fee or time costed services.

A number of our clients and their financial controllers have seen significant benefits when entering into a retainer including:

• Certainty of spend;
• An ability to provision for that spend;
• Reducing the administrative burden of payables which can often be time consuming in a business of size, scale and complexity;
• Over time, your legal provider will grow to understand the commercial aspects and realities of your business and your goals. This in turn can lead to faster and cheaper legal solutions; 
• If work is required outside the scope of the retainer, your lawyer already knows your business and its legal complexities, resulting in a lower spend overall;
• You will not be locked in to a retained agreement.  If at any time if you feel you are not getting value for money you can withdraw from the retainer;
• The retainer can be customised to exclude certain aspects of your legal work or include other matters in order to provide more spend certainty depending on your unique situation;
• You may find you proactively use your legal advisers more rather than avoiding them to avoid traditional time-based costs;
• You will receive access to many different service streams where otherwise it may not be economically viable to hire legal staff across varying areas of expertise; and
• Unlike with internal resources the firm is never on leave, unwell or subject to any form of prolonged absences. We are always here to help you.

There are further benefits in our bespoke retainer agreements document for your consideration.

We have been implementing these arrangements with a number of existing clients on varying levels of cost, size, offering and business complexity for over three years.

Each of these clients has chosen to keep their retainer model in place rather than reverting to the usual traditional billing models over time.  Our clients genuinely feel they receive added value and now prefer knowing their spend in advance and enjoy doing business with this more proactive and engaged approach. We are finding increasing numbers of clients interested in discussing this option with us as it becomes a more in demand approach.

We will be producing a second article on this topic shortly, exploring legal project management and engaging legal experts to manage various groups of in-house and external consultants.

To find out more about how bespoke retainers arrangements could benefit you and your business please contact Zac Herps, Managing Director, on (07) 3220 1144 or zac@hillhouse.com.au.