First of all, start-up enterprises can generally only provide low salaries to full-time legal advisers, and the full-time legal advisers they hire are often younger. Therefore, they inevitably lack experience and skills in dealing with legal risk management affairs.
Secondly, full-time legal advisers are not only engaged in internal legal affairs, but also in many other business management affairs, which cannot further improve the breadth, accuracy and depth of the legal profession and will inevitably affect the quality of legal affairs handling. It is only a matter of time allocation that determines that it is extremely difficult for them to reach the professional level of external legal counsel in terms of overall professional knowledge.
Third, the handling of legal events, especially major events, requires independent and calm judgment and thinking of legal workers, while internal legal affairs and enterprises are subordinate, and it is inevitable that they will not be restricted by their status and status when performing suggestive duties, which will have limited influence and help on leadership decision-making, thus increasing risks in disguise.
Finally, due to the lack of professional inquiry means and opportunities for extensive exchange of legal practice experience, the professional level of full-time legal counsel is limited.
To sum up, it is impossible to establish a perfect legal risk management system for enterprises only by setting up full-time legal advisers within enterprises. In other words, it is impossible to provide all-round legal risk management guarantee for enterprises only by deploying full-time legal consultants. How to make up for this deficiency?
The author believes that a comprehensive legal risk management system with strong operability, low implementation cost and high efficiency should be composed of two service systems: full-time corporate legal counsel (corporate legal affairs agent) and external lawyers (legal counsel).
In the modern corporate governance structure, external lawyers are an extremely important part. Foreign lawyers of some multinational companies can even directly participate in the company's major decisions. In China, with the emergence of intermediary agencies such as law firms that can provide professional services to the society at any time, enterprises have another choice when establishing a legal risk management system, that is, enterprises can hand over the overall framework of establishing and improving their legal risk management system to law firms with obvious professional and experience advantages and set up external lawyers (legal advisers). This choice not only saves the manpower, material resources and financial resources for enterprises to train full-time legal advisers, but also has many advantages compared with full-time legal advisers.
First of all, it is conducive to selecting the best and most suitable lawyers to serve the enterprise. Through competitive bidding and other market-oriented operations, enterprises recruit law firms with legal risk management business from the society, rather than law firms with only professional knowledge and skills and only engaged in legal affairs. In cooperation, enterprises can ask law firms to appoint "tailor-made" professional lawyers engaged in enterprise legal risk management for themselves, that is, to appoint lawyers who best meet the requirements of enterprises and are most suitable for providing specific legal services required by specific enterprises as legal advisers. Once the appointed lawyer can't meet the needs of the enterprise, the enterprise has the right to ask for a replacement at any time without bearing the legal consequences of dismissing the lawyer.
Secondly, it is conducive to giving full play to the advantages of the third party and achieving the best results. In the process of establishing and perfecting the legal risk management system internally and investing in foreign cooperation, the external legal counsel is independent of the enterprise, and his views are professional and authoritative, which is easy to convince. Therefore, when there is deviation in the design or operation of the legal risk management system, or when there is disagreement or even deadlock in the negotiation of foreign cooperation, external legal counsel, as a third party, can get unexpected results in time, prompting the solution or negotiation to continue and achieving a win-win situation. There are many examples of this effect in practical work.
Third, it is conducive to giving full play to the collective wisdom and overall advantages of law firms and safeguarding the interests of enterprises to the maximum extent. Compared with internal legal affairs, external lawyers, as professional lawyers in enterprise legal risk management, generally have high legal attainments and practical experience in legal risk identification, evaluation, solution design, implementation and improvement. It also depends on the rich information, resource advantages and collective wisdom of all lawyers in the law firm. Therefore, when dealing with daily legal affairs and establishing a perfect enterprise legal risk management system, if we foresee legal risks and take countermeasures in advance, that is, in the planning stage before implementation, we must consider possible problems in implementation, seek the most suitable solution, and realize the balance between risk benefits and risk benefits. External lawyers have unparalleled experience in internal legal affairs, thus minimizing legal risks and maximizing corporate interests.
Finally, it is beneficial to cultivate the legal concept of enterprises and the legal risk awareness of executives and employees. In the process of providing legal services for enterprises, external legal counsel evaluates the legal risks existing in enterprises according to the actual situation and legal environment of enterprises, and puts forward complete and operable solutions, so that senior managers and related employees of enterprises can be instilled with legal risk knowledge and legal risk awareness while receiving legal services from lawyers, and improve their legal risk awareness and legal concept. Conduct targeted legal risk management training regularly to help management and employees master the necessary legal knowledge and apply it to work and life.
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