Legal Shared Services in the NHS
The NHS is facing a period of extraordinary challenge. Demand for services continues to rise while financial constraints and workforce shortages are adding pressure to an already complex operating environment. Within this context, NHS organisations are constantly seeking innovative solutions to enhance efficiency, optimise resource allocation, and maintain the highest standards of patient care. Legal services, typically operating in siloed structures within individual Trusts, present a significant opportunity for transformation.
By embracing the concept of legal shared services, the NHS can move beyond traditional models and unlock substantial value, improve access to specialist expertise, and streamline legal operations. This perspective article explores the case for legal shared services as a lever for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of legal support within the NHS.
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The need for transformation in NHS Legal Services
The current landscape of NHS legal services is fragmented, with individual Trusts managing their legal functions and associated spend with external counsel independently. While this approach offers autonomy, it leads to duplication of effort, inconsistencies in practice, and missed opportunities for leveraging collective expertise, legal precedents, external buying power and shared technology investments. Smaller Trusts, in particular, may struggle to attract and retain experienced legal professionals, limiting their access to specialised knowledge and potentially impacting the quality of legal advice available. This limited expertise and capacity drives Trusts extensive use of external third-party legal firms. Furthermore, valuable legal knowledge and precedents often remain siloed within individual Trusts, hindering the development of best practices and consistent approaches across the NHS. This fragmented model can result in inefficiencies, increased costs, and missed opportunities to optimise legal support for the NHS. The need for a more strategic and coordinated approach to legal services is clear.
A New Model for NHS Legal Services
A legal shared service model offers a compelling alternative to the traditional fragmented approaches. By consolidating legal expertise and resources within a centralised function serving multiple Trusts or organisations, the NHS can unlock significant benefits and create true centres of excellence. The private sector has successfully delivered material benefits through these models for well over a decade and there is much to learn from their models. Key features include:
Economic Benefits
Due to the decentralised nature of the current system, individual Trusts are in very different starting positions. Some have significantly outsourced models, relying heavily on external counsel not just for complex work but also for more routine, day to day legal service delivery needs, others have begun to make early stages to consolidate, typically at a local level.
From analogous experience and proven outcomes within the private sector, we anticipate that there is in most cases a 20-30% efficiency/cost reduction opportunity when legal shared services are implemented at scale, accompanied with a re-balancing of the internal/external delivery mix.
Conclusion
In a time of unprecedented challenge for the NHS, legal shared services offer a transformative solution to enhance efficiency, optimise resource allocation, and improve access to specialised legal expertise. By embracing a collaborative and strategic approach to implementation, leveraging technology, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement, the NHS can unlock the full potential of legal shared services, ensuring that legal support functions effectively enable the delivery of high-quality patient care.
