A team of former in-house lawyers at National Australia Bank (NAB) are out to prove that legal work and time do not have to go hand in hand.

 Melanie Noble, Natalie Williams, Chris Broadbent, and Andrew Meldrum have formed a new law firm called Switch Legal, to provide cost efficient and cost certain legal advice. "Dealing on occasions with external lawyers, we saw first hand the struggle that most of the external firms had in really meeting corporates half way in delivering real value and cost certainty," said Nobel, who was most recently head of legal, technology and IP at NAB. "Something we have in our favour is that for the past four years, and previously in other in-house roles, we have worked under pressure to deliver within very short time frames. We are used to doing that now."

Ideally the four directors would like Switch Legal to encourage some of the bigger players in the market to move away from time-based billing, said Broadbent. "The problem with the billable hour is the inefficiency of it; it does don't encourage you to get the job done as efficiently as possible," he said.

They also intend on keeping overheads to a "minimum" so that they are not charging clients for something they don't need. "Even if we were to take on some juniors in the future, we will always be very conscious of the fact that we don't want to be training junior lawyers on clients' time," said Noble.  "Because of their high overheads most their [law firms] ability to really meet client's needs is a difficult."

 With expertise across general commercial areas and TMT the group hope to secure a list of clients across the telecommunications, retail, banking, pharmaceutical, and IT industries. "We know a lot of the IT functions within those industries and that they have need for cost certainty," said Broadbent. "We are doing some transition work for NAB that is ongoing and we are reigniting contacts we have dealt with in the past."

Nobel said NAB had been highly supportive of the team's decision to leave and, "have indicated a willingness to look at our proposition further down the track as well," she added.

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