Running a law firm means balancing demanding clients, regulatory pressure and partner expectations – and the last thing you need is to be distracted by overhead contracts that are out of date, over‑priced or simply not working for you. We help law firms manage their overheads so that partners and fee‑earners can focus on their clients, not on chasing suppliers or decoding complex tariffs. Our focus is on the “hard” office administration and overhead costs – everything from cleaning and waste to telephony and print – excluding people and property. If your firm spends more than £500,000 a year on these non‑people overheads, there is almost always scope to simplify contracts, improve service and reduce cost. We work on a no‑savings, no‑fee basis, so our
interests are fully aligned with yours from day one.

Who we work with and what we cover

We typically work with UK law firms where annual spend on office and administrative overheads (excluding people and property) exceeds £500,000. Engagements are led at managing partner and CFO / FD level, with close involvement from facilities and operations teams.

Typical categories we look after include:
● Office and meeting room cleaning
● Waste and recycling
● Electricity, gas and water
● Telecoms and data services
● Copiers, printers and scanners
● Confidential waste destruction and document storage
● Office consumables and related services

In each category we look at both what you are paying and whether the service specification still matches how your firm actually operates today.

Typical problems we fix

● Contracts that have not been reviewed for years, often inherited from previous premises or merged firms.
● Cleaning arrangements still based on “x hours at £y per hour”, rather than a clear output‑based specification aligned to how your fee‑earners and support teams use the space.
● Multiple suppliers providing the same service to different offices, with different term dates and tariffs, making it impossible to manage strategically.
● Back‑billing disputes and historical billing errors that no‑one has had the time or data to unpick.
● Lack of benchmarking, leaving you unsure whether you are paying a fair market rate for the services and service levels you require.
● Contracts that are simply the wrong size – too much capacity in some areas, too little in others – because the firm has grown, shrunk or changed its working patterns.
● Legacy suppliers whose contracts no longer reflect the way your firm works today, but where the relationship has never been fully revisited.

How our process works

1. Define what “good” looks like
We sit down with your facilities and finance teams – under the sponsorship of the managing partner or CFO – to understand what utopia looks like for each of them. That means clarifying service standards, risk tolerances, billing preferences and how decisions get made.
2. Understand your current position
We gather and analyse your existing contracts, tariffs, invoices and usage data to understand exactly what you are paying, to whom, and for what level of service across each office and category.
3. Benchmark and design the future state
We benchmark your current arrangements against what a fair price looks like for your specific requirements, and identify where contracts need to be right‑sized, consolidated, re‑specified or re‑tendered. We bring you clear options, not theory, and talk them through with you before any decision is made.
4. Implement and manage the transition
Once you have approved the recommendations, we implement the decisions – negotiating new terms, aligning contract dates, moving cleaning to output‑based specifications, resolving disputes and making sure new arrangements are properly set up. We then check bills, submit meter reads where needed and generally hold your hand through the life of the contract so that savings and service levels are sustained.

Commercial model and timescales

Our law firm work is delivered on a no‑savings, no‑fee basis. There are:
● No upfront charges
● Fees calculated as a percentage of actual, delivered unit‑price savings
● Fees paid monthly in arrears, so the engagement is both P&L and cash‑flow enhancing from the outset
You will typically see our written recommendations on your desk within six weeks of engagement. The exact implementation timescales then depend on your existing contract terms and your own appetite for change, but we manage the process so that you can stay focused on your clients.