Insights

As India’s premier provider of secondments since 2018, we’ve been committed to bridging talent gaps in the legal industry. Now, we’re broadening our mission to help legal departments transcend their traditional role and embrace a new future of work.

For thirteen years, we’ve been solving talent problems in the legal space. We were the first ones to get there in 2011, when a bunch of lawyers and HR experts started Vahura with the mission to professionalise legal recruitment in India. We grew steadily, learning that recruitment went way beyond a JD or filling a vacancy. In the supposedly clinical world of the law, we created a space for honest, realistic conversations.

Clients spoke to us candidly about the limitations of traditional recruitment in the face of increasingly unpredictable workloads. Professionals voiced their frustrations about inflexible ways of working that left them unfulfilled and overworked. These concerns were feeding off a wider reality. Outside the legal industry, the nature of work itself was evolving rapidly—into something more modular, distributed, specialised.

And so, in 2018, we founded Counselect, to offer non-traditional talent solutions to ambitious legal departments and curious professionals. The thesis was validated. Over the last six years, we’ve seen both companies and professionals go from sceptics to practitioners to evangelists.

Legal is being pulled in different directions

While solving for the talent requirements of corporate legal departments, we got a clear view of their inner workings. As we completed more mandates and had broader conversations with General Counsels and legal heads, we started noticing the impossible bind that the GC is caught in.

Internally, they’re having to grapple with uninspired talent, bloated workflows, ineffective tech, and teams that are out of sync with the wider business. Externally, their department is being buffeted by the winds of regulatory change, heavy compliance burdens, and extraordinary technological advancements.

Yes, it’s true that legal’s core role has become even more critical with everything that’s going on outside. Yet, the same stressors are causing companies to ask their legal teams how they can transcend their traditional role as a downside-protecting cost centre and transform into an upside-creating strategic unit.

Paradoxically, these challenges have led to a state of inertia in legal departments. This is entirely understandable. From our front-row seat, we’ve seen and heard too many stories of hiring-and-backfiring, white elephant technologies, and consultants who are never heard from again after filing half-baked reports and full-baked invoices.

But, nested within these challenges, we’ve also glimpsed an unprecedented opportunity. It’s a chance to build the resilient, adaptive, and innovative legal department of the future.

We need an integrated approach to innovation

Our breakthrough came when we acknowledged that talent is only one piece of the puzzle. Talent is the ‘who’—but the ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘why’ are inextricably linked to the ‘who’. Building a legal department that creates strategic value calls for more than piecemeal efforts; it demands an integrated view of all the components that make up the legal department.

Meaningful innovation cannot begin without a clear understanding of how all the moving parts are feeding off each other. How does talent interact with tech? How do workflows influence how teams are organised? If a business wants to create a competitive advantage using legal intelligence, the legal department has to think laterally. If the legal department has to transform, it has to take an integrated view of innovation.

Launching a new suite of integrated solutions

Today, we’re announcing a set of solutions that embody this integrated yet nimble view of innovation. The new offerings expand our focus to provide multidisciplinary consulting and managed solutions that help legal departments contribute greater value to the wider enterprise.

Legal business consulting

Reliable advice on strategy, operations, management, and innovation-related matters. Far from being the slideshow-and-scoot kind of consultants, we’ll hold your hand when it comes to the trickiest part of change: execution.

Legal tech synergy

Burnt your fingers over a shiny new tool? We look beyond hype cycles and hacks to provide technology evaluation, strategy advice, and implementation support that is grounded in an understanding of feasibility, impact, and scalability.

Contract Excellence

End-to-end contracting solutions that support the pipeline of origination, negotiation, consensus-building, and closing. We do this by streamlining workflows, building playbooks, helping you deploy technology, and leveraging analytics.

Global Legal Capability Centres

The world has moved on from the old outsourcing model. We help global businesses build out India-based legal capability centres where the talent is engaged in strategic work while the technology rationalises back office processes.

Streams

In this season of newness, we’ve also renewed our commitment to talent solutions, which is where our roots lie and which will always be part of our DNA.

It’s in this spirit that we are pleased to launch Streams, which helps legal departments assemble a flexible, distributed workforce to manage their workstreams in better, quicker, and cheaper ways.

A new website that brings it all together

We’re also launching a spanking new website today! It has taken many months of work, and represents the culmination of all that we’ve been thinking and talking about for years now.

Not only does it contain details of all our solutions, it reflects the philosophy and approach with which we hope to approach the challenges and opportunities in the business of law.

We’ve also recently onboarded several new members and leaders on our team, all of whom resonate deeply with our mission and values. They join a solid team that has a few folks who’ve seen all iterations of change, since the early days of Vahura in 2011.

Learn more about our mission and our team here.

A new, dedicated experience for professionals

We’ve also launched a dedicated website for legal professionals who want to have it all—a fulfilling career, an unfettered life, money in the bank.

Learn more about the flexible career paths we facilitate, how they work, and how to register to become part of Counselect’s Talent Panel.

A brand new identity

We can’t deliver change if we don’t change ourselves. If you’ve worked with us before and have now seen our new websites, you would have noticed that we’ve undergone a complete identity overhaul.

And if you’ve been reading upto this point, you’ll know that it’s not change for the sake of change. Everything about our new identity captures something essential about our new integrated approach. Take the choice of using colour gradients on the website. It suggests how one solution blends into another, combining into a seamless whole that adds colour and character to what is perceived as a monochromatic domain.

What ties all this together is the idea of the crucible, a bowl where different elements are fused to alchemise something new. The crucible is represented by the breve sign in Counselect’s new logo. In musical notation, the breve symbol is also used to depict a note that is the equivalent of two whole notes. It’s the perfect signifier for Counselect’s evolution as a place where disciplines converge, where parts become whole, where transformation is baked into tradition.

And that brings us to this Substack. This is going to be the place where we will make announcements, share opinions, and tell fascinating stories about the future of law and work.