Request for Information for Legal Services

LJMU has a small established in house legal function which consists of 6 solicitors (which includes the University Secretary) and a personal assistant ("Legal Team"). The Legal Team is managed on a day to day basis by the Head of Legal and Deputy General Counsel (who is a practising solicitor) with oversight from the University Secretary and General Counsel.

The Legal Team is instructed on a variety of topics which consist of the following:

1. Employment law (advice on HR casework processes (discipline, grievance etc), TUPE, whistleblowing, discrimination, trade union issues, redundancy, policy and contract reviews, Employment Tribunal claims, settlement agreements)

2. Commercial law (this includes research contracts, collaboration agreements, non disclosure agreements, SaaS, PaaS, apprenticeship contracts, licence agreements, assignments of intellectual property, franchise contracts, funding agreements, sub contractor agreements, general terms and conditions, marketing)

3. Litigation (consumer complaints, business to business complaints)

4. Property (drafting and negotiating sale, purchase and lease documentation, deeds of variation, filing requirements with Land Registry, reviewing title documents and advising on the same, including restrictive covenants, drafting and negotiating property licence agreements, advising on forfeiture of leases, planning law advice)

5. Student governance and regulatory advice

6. Data protection matters (in conjunction with the Data Protection Officer, including responses to data subject access requests and Freedom of Information Act requests).

At present the Legal Team are using a SharePoint site as a document management system which is currently being refined to add in some case management functionality.

The Legal Team are looking to test the market in terms of an innovative solution which would allow the Legal Team to focus on strategic high value high complexity matters by freeing up their time spent on routine low cost and low complexity matters. The proposed solution could include both AI and human resource or one or the other.

The Legal Team have a basic set of precedents and would like to work towards a playbook or knowledge management system to assist the Legal Team and their colleagues in other departments.

The overall objective of the proposed solution is that it would deliver faster turnaround times for routine legal workflows, improve self-service capabilities for colleagues both inside and outside of the Legal Team, and enhance data management capabilities.

We are looking to create a framework of Legal Providers who can assist with our workload. Therefore are inviting companies to complete a Request for Information to enable us to perform market research prior to embarking on a tender exercise