24 February, 2018
- Hong Kong NewLaw veteran, Lesley Hobbs, establishes Cognatio Law to tap into the growing demand for flexible legal services providers in Hong Kong.
- Looks to further disrupt the legal services sector amidst growing pressure from in-house teams to reduce headcount and increase cost efficiencies.
NewLaw industry veteran, Lesley Hobbs, announced today the launch of her own firm Cognatio Law, to satisfy growing demand within Hong Kong’s legal market for flexible and cost effective legal services that helpscompanies big and small. The company assists in-house legal teams who are facing downward pressure to reduce their legal project costs, headcount and fixed expenses by seconding experts quickly and at short notice onto any given project and without the risk of incurring additional permanent employee costs.
According to Lesley, Cognatio Law is an evolution in Hong Kong of the flexible lawyering business model that has been around for many years but, that has only truly become a regular fixture for in-house legal teams on a global basis in the past ten years and has grown from strength to strength in Asia in as little as seven years.
“Hong Kong is the leading Asia legal centre and it has definitely been undergoing a quiet revolution to challenge the Big Law establishment and traditions that have dictated the way legal solutions were offered in the last century. In a very short period, General Counsels, Heads of Legal and in-house legal teams have changed the way they structure various projects to include flexible resourcing to achieve their goals.”
“This is evident from a recruitment sector perspective whereby head hunting firms have had to adapt from being providers of permanent headcount, to engaging with their clients as solutions providers for short-term/one-off projects or providing talent who don’t warrant a big law firm budget,” she said. “While recruitment firms may be able to provide a short-term fix, they don’t match up with in-house legal teams’ long-term goals to reduce headcount or the fixed costs associated with having to employ permanent staff.”
With the addition of Cognatio Law to the Hong Kong flexible legal services market, financial services organisations and multi-national companies (MNCs) will now be able to choose from six NewLaw providers, which is in stark contrast to the option of just one provider back in 2010.
The rise of NewLaw in Hong Kong closely follows the global trend and points to an increasing tendency by internal risk management teams who are widening their use of “on demand” expertise – not only for senior legal counsel on legal projects, but also in other areas of the business including the human resources, compliance, procurement and IT functions.
With ongoing structural changes to the financial services sector since the global financial crisis – and downward pressure by transnational and local legislation/regulators (including HKMA and SFC), legal teams are continually being asked to deliver more for less. In Hong Kong and Asia particularly, senior legal counsel is being channelled into companies for projects to cover internal investigations, mediation, data privacy; pan-global legislation; China’s cyber security laws and directors’ and officer’s responsibilities.
