By Alex Blues – Head of IT Sourcing at PA Consulting Group

At PA Consulting Group, we are always looking to find best practice in and around the sourcing marketplace. As a result, we have found that it can often be useful to step back from traditional practices and ask the WHY question and challenge what has always been conventionally been accepted as best practice.

An area PA has recently focused on is the difference in, and potential overlap between, the role of the lawyer and the role of an adviser when concluding a sourcing deal. In recent weeks, there have been numerous comments highlighting the extremely high fees that rack up when law firms and advisers ‘help their clients’.

When striking a sourcing deal, an organisation is clearly going to be looking for a single outcome that is sensible, sustainable and achieves the overall business objectives. So why is it that in numerous instances the sourcing advice (sourcing strategy and SLAs), and the legal side of the contract are chosen and handled by two separate organisations?

For example, the lawyer is chosen by the legal department and the sourcing advisor is chosen by the procurement department or by the wider business. These two separate organisations are often thrown together in courtship without any clear view or guidance on how they are going to work together moving forward.

So who is co-ordinating the overall outcome? Who is looking at the roles of each function? And who is making sure that the client is not paying twice for these services? There is a substantial overlap between what the law firm deems is its responsibility and what the adviser believes is theirs, particularly if the respective parties have not previously worked together.

Therefore, for large, complex sourcing transactions, there should ideally be one single contract, highlighting comprehensible outcomes and including both legal advice and sourcing advice, enabling absolute clarity and avoiding any overlap. The client organisation is then fully reassured and protected and can clearly articulate the pertinent risks and desired deliverable under this one contract.