Leverage Outside Legal Teams to Create Efficiency and Workflow

The media and entertainment industries are in the midst of sweeping transformations as advances in technology, content delivery models, and infrastructure continue to reshape how, where and when content and information are consumed. These evolutions are also challenging current business model constructs and forcing executives and owners to rethink how they operate so that they can evolve and capitalize on these disruptions.

The traditional business model contemplates an infrastructure that includes a variety of in- house legal roles that have usually been hyper focused on a specific discipline such as simple rights licensing or litigation. However, given the fast-evolving and morphing media and entertainment landscape it is imperative that organizations have the ability and the resources to tackle a wide array of legal disciplines in order to optimize their business and revenue opportunities. We’re seeing this occur real time with the advent of NFT’s, crypto currency, AR, VR, and the meta verse. As a result of this, more and more organizations are looking to outside firms that have the ability to serve as a complete off-site business & legal affairs team which allows the organization to scale up when needed and scale back, when necessary, while still having the skills and resources to maintain the required level of competence and high-quality output of work. This approach not only offers expanded work- flow bandwidth and operational resources to organizations, but it also helps from an overhead expense perspective. While many larger organizations still defer to the in-house attorney model, hiring in-house attorneys is often not practical for smaller businesses. Particularly for smaller businesses, hiring an outside firm can be an extremely smart choice and makes for optimized growth opportunity.

When an organization outsources their business & legal affairs, this eliminates the need to have attorneys as employees on their payroll making this approach a much more cost- effective option for their business operations – particularly for startups or a small business. In addition, because the attorneys at the outsourced firm are not deemed employees, your business will not be responsible for providing certain benefits that it would need to provide to an employee. In other words, by outsourcing your business & legal affairs work, you can keep legal costs down for your business thus reducing your overhead expense.

Outsourcing allows an organization to operate in an “accordion” fashion where they often will not be obligated to use the firms’ services routinely; you can use the firm’s services and pay for them only when you need them. There is no need for a long-time commitment. You do not have to commit to an outside firm for a long-term business relationship as you would need to do if you hired in-house attorneys.

I believe one of the other key benefits of outsourcing your business & legal affairs work is that an outside firm can often offer an unbiased perspective on an organization’s legal matters. Since the attorneys serving as outside attorneys are not employees of the organization, they can provide you with a more objective reading of some of the issues your organization may be facing.