Selecting the right legal professional

Many briefs implicitly ask for “a senior lawyer,” when what the business actually needs is one of three things: rapid throughput (high-volume contracting), a narrow specialist perspective (privacy, sanctions, regulated products, ESG disclosure), or a delivery leader who can stabilise a workstream and keep it moving.

The most effective briefs function like a project charter. Instead of listing generic responsibilities, they clearly define the scope of the work. They should answer key questions: What is the business objective? What are the expected deliverables and timelines? What specific decision does legal need to enable?

In a flexible resourcing context, a well-defined brief accelerates the matching process. It enables a provider to quickly identify the right expertise for the project, reducing the internal team's burden of translating requirements.

It is also crucial to be explicit about the responsibilities of the core team versus the flexible professional. A clear scope of work and defined escalation points are the fastest way to integrate an external resource, protecting the time of in-house lawyers and preserving quality control.

A practical way to test whether your brief is outcome-based is to see if it answers three questions clearly: what needs to be delivered, by when, and how you will know it is done. When those are clear, you can match the profile to the work much more precisely.

In a flexible resourcing context, this is where you unlock speed. PwC Switzerland’s Flexible Legal Resources (FLR) model is designed to match projects with the right expertise without committing to long-term engagements, helping clients reduce fixed labour costs while accessing specialised skills when required. ¨ The better the brief, the faster that matching can be — and the less “translation work” your internal team has to do.

Most “misses” happen because teams ask for a profile that is too broad. In reality, niche gaps are usually specific. If you need privacy expertise, say whether it’s product counselling, DPIAs, vendor contracting, incident response readiness, or policy work. If you need support in a transaction, say whether it’s due diligence coordination, drafting, negotiation, or PMO-style tracking and stakeholder management. 

A good shortlist process does not need to be long. It needs to be diagnostic.

One of the most effective techniques is scenario-based evaluation: ask the candidate how they would handle the exact kind of decision your business faces. Not abstract questions, but your reality: which clauses are non‑negotiable, what your fallback positions are, where approvals get stuck, how fast stakeholders expect answers, and what happens when priorities change mid-week.

When the fit is right, you can stabilise delivery during peak periods, keep sensitive decisions close to the business, and reduce reactive outsourcing. A poor fit leads to costs in multiple areas: missed timelines, stakeholder dissatisfaction, rework, and the unnecessary escalation of matters to external counsel.

Clients often worry: “Will a flexible lawyer slow us down?” In reality, onboarding discipline is the difference between immediate impact and frustration.

The first two weeks should be designed around access and context: tool access, templates, risk positions, and introductions to the stakeholders who make or break decisions. When those inputs are ready, a flexible professional can contribute quickly — particularly in delivery-heavy workstreams where throughput and consistency are the main goals.

This is exactly the problem FLR is intended to solve: providing the right expertise when you need it, and enabling quicker onboarding for immediate impact as part of the service model.