The In-House Edit
Sometimes you don't need more Legal. You need Legal to work better. Two days. Fresh eyes. Better Legal.
Sometimes the legal issue isn't the law.
It's the contract that still requires four approvals because nobody remembers why.
The template everyone complains about but nobody has time to rewrite.
The business team sending routine questions to Legal because no one ever gave them a playbook.
The technology you bought but never quite operationalized.
The outside counsel relationship that made perfect sense three years ago and somehow became the default answer to everything.
None of those things necessarily requires a transformation initiative.
Sometimes they require someone experienced to come inside the function, ask good questions and see what the people living in the system no longer see.
That's The In-House Edit.
Two days inside your legal function.
PPSC Counsel spends two focused days on-site with your legal team and the business partners who interact with it.
We talk to the people doing the work.
We look at how contracts actually move—not how the process map says they move.
We look at templates, approvals, intake, escalation, technology, recurring questions, outside counsel usage and the work that seems to consume a disproportionate amount of everyone's time.
And we ask a very simple question:
Does this still make sense?
Not whether there was once a reason for it.
Whether it makes sense now.
What we look for
Every legal department is different, so this is deliberately not a checklist-driven audit.
But we are usually looking for things like:
- —Contract processes that are more complicated than the underlying risk
- —Templates that create negotiation instead of preventing it
- —Approvals that could be narrowed, delegated or eliminated
- —Recurring legal questions that could become playbooks or self-service tools
- —Work sitting with Legal that could responsibly move back to the business
- —Places where technology, automation or AI could remove administrative friction
- —Outside counsel work that could be handled differently or brought in-house
- —Risks that deserve more attention than they are currently getting
- —Processes everyone dislikes but nobody has had the time—or distance—to reconsider
The objective is not optimization for optimization's sake.
It is to make the legal function more useful to the business.
A different view of outside counsel.
PPSC Counsel is outside counsel.
We also don't believe "outside counsel said it was okay" should become a substitute for internal judgment.
There are matters where specialized outside counsel is exactly what a company needs.
There are also matters that should never have needed a $1,200-an-hour answer in the first place.
Good outside counsel should help clients recognize the difference.
If the right recommendation is to call us less often, we'll tell you that.
We consider that good lawyering.
What you get
Not a 70-page presentation.
Not twelve weeks of stakeholder interviews.
Not an implementation roadmap designed to create another consulting engagement.
You get two intensive days of experienced attorney attention, candid conversations and an outside perspective on what we would keep, change, simplify, automate, escalate or stop doing altogether.
We finish with a working debrief focused on the changes most likely to make the function work better.
No ceremonial deliverables required.
No obligation to hire PPSC Counsel to implement anything afterward.
Just useful judgment.
Who this is for
The In-House Edit is designed for lean legal departments, growing companies and legal teams that know something could be working better but have not had the bandwidth—or distance—to figure out exactly what.
It can be particularly useful after:
- —Significant growth
- —Leadership changes
- —New technology implementation
- —Expansion into new products or business lines
- —Increasing contract volume
- —Changes in outside counsel usage
- —Several years of processes quietly accumulating on top of one another
You do not need a broken legal department.
In fact, some of the best candidates are already very good legal teams.
Fresh eyes are valuable precisely because you know your own system too well.
The goal is not more Legal.
It may be faster contracts.
Better escalation.
Fewer unnecessary reviews.
More confident business teams.
Smarter use of technology.
More intentional outside counsel spend.
More time for the lawyers to do the work that actually requires lawyers.
Usually, it is some combination of those things.
Sometimes you don't need more Legal.
You need Legal to work better.
THE IN-HOUSE EDIT
Two days. On-site. Flat fee.
Interested in putting your legal function under the hood?
Talk to PPSC Counsel