Why a desk, not an hourly firm

The people who run Icon.Partners Contract Desk have spent more than a decade doing commercial and licensing work for technology companies across forty-odd jurisdictions, a great many of them selling across EU borders. The recurring scene is the same everywhere: a software company of sixty people, a customer’s MSA in the inbox, a founder or a head of sales reading it at eleven at night, and a lawyer somewhere who would review it — for an hourly fee, in a week, with a memo that lists the problems and leaves the negotiation to the founder.

Software has since arrived to make the memo faster. That is genuinely useful. It does not change the scene. Somebody still has to get on the call with the other side’s counsel, trade the liability cap for the renewal term, and carry the document to a signature. That part is a lawyer’s job, and it is the part nobody had packaged.

What a desk is

A fixed monthly fee. Unlimited routine commercial contracts. Reviewed, redlined and negotiated to signature by our own lawyers, with a production team behind it that makes the first pass fast and the tenth contract of the month as unremarkable as the first. English, Estonian, Polish and EU law by our own team; everything else by lawyers qualified where the question arises.

What it is not

It is not a provider that does everything. Litigation, financings and acquisitions are separate engagements, with a separate price. It is not a software product; there is no dashboard to learn. And it is not a place where a contract goes to a model and comes back with a warning label. Every position that reaches a counterparty has been through a lawyer who is responsible for it.

The decision has already been made, several times

None of this is new, and the companies that went first were not short of lawyers. BT Group — a telecom group with more than two hundred lawyers in-house — has run its commercial contracting through an external contract desk since 2013, covering purchasing, licensing and enterprise customer agreements in four languages, and has expanded the arrangement rather than brought it back in-house. In 2018 General Electric moved a large part of its commercial legal work to an external managed-services provider, citing cost and speed, with in-house lawyers transferring across. And DXC Technology, a Fortune 500 IT services company, handed the bulk of its global law function to a managed provider in 2017, then won the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Value Champion award for it the following year.

The market followed. The Thomson Reuters Institute puts alternative legal services at roughly €26bn (US $28.5bn) in 2024, growing about 18% a year, with 57% of corporate legal departments already using an external provider. Those are not our clients and their desks are far bigger than ours. But the reasoning is identical: routine commercial paper is better bought as a finished product at a known price than as hours. If a company with two hundred lawyers reached that conclusion, a sixty-person software house with none is not taking a risk by reaching it too.

Why flat

Because hourly billing changes behaviour. When each question costs money, people stop asking, and the contracts that most need a second look are the ones that do not get it. A flat fee inverts the incentive: the more a client sends, the better we understand their business and the faster the work gets. We would rather be paid to close deals quickly than to spend time on them.

That is the whole idea. The rest of this site is the detail.