Finally, outsourcing done right

A better model for outsourcing Regular legal services

Traditional law firms and ‘NewLaw’ both struggle to offer modern enterprises a truly flexible model for taking care of their everyday legals. Artificer OnDemand sits between these options, offering a flexible model that we’ve designed to provide better service than NewLaw’s subscriptions, but cost less than full outsourcing to a traditional law firm.

How does it Work?
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Better than NewLaw, Cheaper than BigLaw

WHat is OnDemand?

OnDemand is Artificer’s subscription legal help desk service that offers a mid-point between a ‘NewLaw’ subscription and an ongoing retainer with a traditional law firm. Just like in a subscription, it allows you to average out your legal spend over a longer period of time to save money. However, we have tried to include much more in the subscription so you don’t have to dip into your ‘extras fund’ (or whatever term is used) as part of your regular operations.

Who is it for?

It’s for organisations of any size who either don’t have internal legal counsel, or who want to supplement their internal capability without purchasing traditional by-the-hour legal services. The ideal client would have a regular need for legal services, but not want to commit to the same service provider for a long-term contract like that offered by NewLaw. Our minimum contract period is only one year and you can combine it with other providers.

Are you sure the balance is right?

We developed OnDemand after observing that NewLaw subscriptions excluded too much in the standard package. We know clients will pay a little bit more if they’re confident they won’t be hit with a surprise exclusion in the middle of the subscription. So we’re sitting right in the sweet spot where you can use your subscription for a really broad range of day-to-day issues, but still pay less than traditional law firms.

What makes it so flexible?

It uses a modern help-desk application to track your service requests, and we pick up the phone frequently to let you talk to a human. Also, we will pre-allocate hours for our practitioners to service you in a subscription year and let you ‘roll over’ unused hours within a rolling 3-month quarter. You don’t have to worry about seasonal variances in requirement, and you’ve always got a budget of hours to meet your needs at a great discounted price.

How it works

Here’s a quick overview of the five steps to integrating streamlined legal services directly into your organisation.

OnDemand is our subscription legal help-desk, with a direct interface to your team for assistance with a wide variety of commercial legal matters.

Artificer OnDemand at a Glance

Here are the five steps to getting started with Artificer OnDemand and streamlining the way you integrate legal services into your organisation.

Choose your Plan

Artificer OnDemand can be tailored to suit organisations of any size or industry. We have standard plans available that come with enough Allocated Hours to suit a number of business scenarios. In each case, an Allocated Hour is an hour of work that you can commit to purchasing at a discounted and blended rate for use in service requests made through the OnDemand Platform.

Select your Authorised Users

Artificer OnDemand gives members of your team a direct line to a legal practitioner, embedding legal assistance into their ordinary workflow. Your organisation can select a group of Authorised Users; for instance, your sales manager who approves custom sales terms, or your operations manager who reviews privacy subject access requests. These Users can log a service request quickly on our online platform, and the service request is answered by our team of commercial lawyers.

Complete Onboarding

For new customers, each subscription includes onboarding, where Artificer lawyers will become familiar with the needs of each of your Authorised Users. You can use this opportunity to provide us with your standard terms, your playbooks and any other preferences you have when working through the legal challenges your organisation faces regularly.

Submit service requests

Once onboarding is complete, Artificer provides support via the OnDemand digital help desk platform. You can log a ticket or email your requests, and one of our lawyers will answer and guide you through to resolution. The help desk platform provides a system of record for the service request and ensures we’re able to be highly responsive in tracking your request.

Track and manage your usage

Usage of the service is tracked based on your Allocated Hours; these are hours available to you to use at a discounted and blended rate, and each subscription includes a different level of Allocated Hours. If you exceed your Allocated Hours, Artificer will still assist at our great value ordinary rates. If you don’t use all your Allocated Hours in a given month you can ‘roll over’ unused hours within each calendar quarter. You can request your Allocated Hours balance in the platform at any time, and if you want to manage your usage carefully we can provide upfront estimates for each service request outlining how long we think the request will take to complete.

What is Included?

The value you get from a recurring legal services arrangement is tied directly to the scope of inclusions, our service has a broad set of inclusions so you get better value. Read on to find out more.

Many legal services subscriptions exist, but we think you’ll find ours offers the best balance between price and level of inclusions.

What kind of requests are included

In our standard plans, OnDemand Allocated Hours can be used to assist with most commercial legal matters. This includes things like:

  • Reviewing, advising on and drafting contracts like Software Subscription Agreements, Services Statements of Works, Master Services Agreements, Channel Partner Agreements, Non-Disclosure Agreements and others.
  • Advice on internal employment matters like awards, drafting of employment agreements, bonus structures, employee share option plans and similar incentive schemes.
  • Advice on privacy matters, data governance and an initial triage and eligible data breach assessment of a cyber incident (note a the full recommended scope of work to respond to a cyber incident is excluded from the normal scope).
  • Anything else not specifically excluded under your plan and the Ondemand Subscription Agreement.

What is excluded?

OnDemand is designed to help with transactional or commercial inhouse legal work, so there are some exclusions that help keep it within that scope. You can view the full list of exclusions here, but in short OnDemand does not include:

  • Taxation and accounting advice (if your accountant is unable to assist, there may be scope for us to assist in distinct legal matter).
  • registration of some Intellectual Property interests (such as patent registrations), that being said Australian Trade Mark applications are not excluded.
  • Litigation and dispute resolution, including any court appearances or filing (except for an initial opinion recommending escalation to a dedicated legal matter).
  • Legal advice or other work performed or given to an entity other than the company we are contracted with (this means a lot of areas like criminal law, family law, succession law are out of scope, as they relate to the legal matters of a person not a corporate entity).
  • Cyber incident response services beyond an initial triage and eligible data breach assessment.
  • Word processing support, formatting, design or document presentation work.

The service is always provided subject to the limitations of the selected package. For most standard packages you receive a pre-defined number of hours on a regular basis to put towards any services, so services will be limited to those hours, and services where we cannot perform the full estimated scope of works without exhausting the hours will not go ahead unless approval is obtained to increase the hours or have them separately billed. See below for our pricing plans.

Why is it better?

Let us take you through some of the reasons why OnDemand gets the balance right comapared to both traditional services and similar subscription arrangements leave more to be desired.

OnDemand is the cheaper, faster and constantly improving legal service subscription that blends new technology with traditional human service.

Is it better value than buying legal services normally?

There are numerous advantages to embedding a digital help-desk presence into your team rather than formally engaging a lawyer for assistance only when it’s needed, let’s go through them.

It’s cheaper

In exchange for the committent to the minimum volume purchase over one year, we’re offering a significant discount blended rate on our legal services.

It’s faster

OnDemand works by pre-establishing a communications pathway and using a digital platform that we can integrate into your tech stack. That saves us both time when assisting you.

It’s easier

The online help-desk platform does the heavy lifting in terms of tracking communications and integrates directly with email. Executives in your team can just reply to the dedicated email address or use the platform online in order to communicate.

It’s evolving

We’re using our internal development capability to tweak functionality and improve the platform all the time. We’re dedicated to making this the best subscription help desk available.

Is it better value than similar subscription models?

We think we’ve got the balance right compared to similar subscription models for legal services delivery. Let’s explore some of the key benefits where we see OnDemand helping you more.

LEss Exclusions

Compared to other products, we’ve tried to be much more meaningful about what you can use the subscription’s ‘Allocated Hours’ for. Some subscriptions say you get ‘Unlimited x or y‘, but when you read the exclusions, you can see that doesn’t apply to every type of legal problem that your business might encounter. We make it easier to use your included Allocated Hours to meet your practical needs, without having to purchase extra hours or ‘top up’ because of these exclusions. In short, OnDemand is designed to cover more.

Roll-Over Unused Hours

One of the criticisms of using hours to track subscription usage is the notion of ‘wasted hours’. It’s a fine line to balance, because the design of the model is to provide regularity, and we offer a discount in exchange for that regularity. However we know that there is a natural ebb and flow of requirements for legal services in many organisations.

To address this, we’ve built in a ‘roll-over’ mechanism where customers can move their purchased ‘Allocated Hours’ to the next month if they are unused, within a rolling quarter. This simple change to the model mitigates the problem of wasted hours significantly, and gives us more certainty by retaining the use of hours, making it sustainable to offer the product to organisations like yours.

Low, Blended Rates

We offer a simple low blended rate discount for every Allocated Hour you purchase in the subscription. This simplifies things significantly and means less time spent worrying about the distribution of work between Senior or Junior legal practitioners. Depending on your level of regular committent, you can unlock rates that are lower than $200 per hour – it’s incredible value.

Introductory Standard Pricing Plans

To celebrate the launch of Artificer OnDemand, we are offering our standard plans at special introductory pricing.

Starter

Give your sales or ops Team a boost

Ideal for organisations that need a little bit of legal help to get the most out of their sales, operations or management teams.

$2,662

per month

for 12 Allocated Hours

Total cost per Allocated Hour is $221.83. Over the 12-month minimum term, total cost is $31,944 for the overall 144 Allocated Hours.

Save about $2,188 per month*

Project

Great for dedicated legal projects

For organisations that have a few legal projects each year, or that want to offload pressure from their existing in-house legal team.

$7,953

per month

for 42 Allocated Hours

Total cost per Allocated Hour is $189.36. Over the 12-month minimum term, total cost is $95,436 for the overall 504 Allocated Hours.

Save about $9,726 per month*

Outsource

Get Regular Assistance at a great rate

For organisations that want daily legal assistance with their operations or that anticipate a year of big projects requiring counsel.

$15,532

per month

for 86 Allocated Hours

Total cost per Allocated Hour is $180.60. Over the 12-month minimum term, total cost is $186,384 for the overall 1032 Allocated Hours.

Save about $19,139 per month*

* Based on a model that assumes you would otherwise purchase the hours at our standard rates and distribute about 50% of the work to a Lawyer, 33% to a Senior Lawyer and 17% to a Principal Lawyer, which we view as reasonable target distribution figures for most legal matters. Actual savings could vary, but it’s worth noting in each case that the Total Cost per Allocated Hour is cheaper than any hour purchased on our already low standard rates.

Terms and conditions apply to purchases of OnDemand, please see the OnDemand Subscription Agreement for details.

FAQs

We’ve collected some common questions here about Artificer OnDemand. Please feel free to write to us below using the form if we’ve missed an important question you have.

Is it better than using a legal AI product?

There are some great legal AI products out there designed to help with contract amendments or answer questions about legal compliance. However, there’s a reason these tools are largely targeted at legal practitioners and not following a direct to end-client model. Principally, AI models can’t ‘think’ outside the box they’re trained in, they can’t critically ‘think’ and they can’t take initiative.

When our practitioners are drafting your contract amendments, answering legal questions or considering your compliance challenges, they’re trying to stand in your shoes and make your life easier. It’s hard for an AI model to compete with that because it’s fundamentally about relating to experiences in the real world of business.

We’ve thought about integrating AI capability into OnDemand, however we think the value of the product would be diminished if we did. That doesn’t mean our practitioners will be slowly doing things manually behind the scenes; we use the latest AI tooling to help us get your work done faster. But we won’t be letting AI dictate the end product.

Is it better value than buying legal services normally?

Well we are intentionally selling hours at a blended and discounted rate in exchange for a minimum usage commitment over a subscription term, so that’s better value if you’re in an organisation that uses legal services regularly.

More broadly though, we think its much better to embed a digital presence into your team this way rather than formally engage a lawyer only when it seems like one is needed. We work much more closely with our regular clients than we do with clients for once-off engagements; the goal being to make sure as advisors we’re positioned to proactively save you from creating a silent back-log of issues that might require attention or cause a serious management headache.

This format allows us to come in at a ground level and understand what your front-line personnel need help with most often. Spend control is built into the process and you can get an update on the progress of ‘Allocated Hours’ eroded at any time on our online portal.

How quickly can you get started?

We can start straight away. Take a quick look at our pricing options and select a plan. If you have any questions, you can contact us for a discussion about your options and how we might be able to assist.

What happens if I run out of Allocated Hours?

You decide what happens from the two possible choices: (1) we continue working on your ticket/issue at our standard rates and invoice you at the end of the month for the additional time we spend; or (2) we notify you before starting work on your a requested ticket/issue that it’s likely to exceed your remaining Allocated Hours, and confirm what should remain in-scope or to what extent to proceed with our assistance.

There is of course no guarantee that you will have the work required to exactly use all the Allocated Hours, but that’s part of the reason why we’ve built in the substantial discount on our usual rates.

Is it billed in advance or in arrears?

It is currently billed monthly in arrears, we require a direct debit facility for the regular subscription payment, and then any extra services over and above the Allocated Hours that you use we will bill normally with 30 day terms.

Is it possible to waste Allocated Hours if I don’t use them in a given month?

It’s possible but we’ve built in mechanisms to help mitigate waste.

Because there’s no guarantee that you will have the work required to exactly use all the Allocated Hours, you may not have work to use them on in any given month. That’s part of the reason why we’ve built in the substantial discount to the blended rate for each Allocated Hour.

Additionally, we’ve built in a reallocation/roll-over mechanism for months where you have very low usage, allowing you to roll-over unused Allocated Hours up to two times in row. This is intended to allow you to adapt the service to the usual ebbs and flows in your requirements for legal services.

Why is your list of exclusions so long?

If you look at them closely, we’re not actually excluding many types of legal services that commercial organisations will need.

We’ve done our homework on competing offers, and one of the things we observed was that discretionary exclusions were quite a common term. In other words, even though you’re paying a monthly fee, the provider of the services has a broad licence to say that you have to pay extra to get help with your specific problem.

We wanted to take a different approach where you could have more peace of mind upfront that legal problems you had would be covered in the cost. So even though the exclusions list may seem long, most of the exclusions are not related to areas of legal practice. Based on our analysis, OnDemand customers can use the service for more legal work than competing products. If you can find a competing subscription that doesn’t exclude something that OnDemand does, let us know and we might find a way to make it an inclusion for you.

I expected it to be cheaper, why is it this expensive?

If the pricing seems expensive, it might be because you’re fortunate enough not to require the regular intervention of legal counsel in the running of your business. If you only need once-off or infrequent assistance, OnDemand might be too much for your enterprise. In that case, we’d be happy to assist you with a great value quote for once-off assistance. If you’re running an intensive project, we can also assign a lawyer to assist you full-time for the duration of the project.

OnDemand is more focused on helping organisations that know they have a regular spend, and want to save money overall by averaging out that spend across the period of one or more years. In this case, OnDemand is typically much cheaper than the equivalent level of assistance from traditional firms, and more valuable than the assistance from ‘NewLaw’ style subscription arrangements because of its broader level of inclusions.

Is the advertised price GST inclusive?

Yes the advertised prices on this page are inclusive of GST. For any additional services that you purchase, the Subscription Agreement will provide hourly rates that are GST exclusive, and will be labelled as such.

What are your standard rates?

We provide them upon enquiry on a Commercial in Confidence basis. if you make an enquiry and give us a basic overview of your business we will happily provide you with a draft/proposal Subscription Agreement which will include our standard rates.

Keen to know more?

Free onboarding

Once you’ve selected your desired plan, we’ll onboard you for free, just get in touch using the form and we’ll setup a time to integrate our legal help desk into your workflow where it will help most.

Tailored plans available

Got a unique set of challenges and think we might be able to assist? Let us know in the form and we will come up with something that suits your circumstances.

Ask us anything

Need more info to get started? Feel free to drop a videoconference or booking link into the form and we’ll answer any questions you have.

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