What is EQWAL?

EQWAL enables corporate legal departments to flexibly adapt their internal workforce. Whether due to a staffing shortage, a special project, or new regulations which require generalist expertise or specialist inhouse counsel, EQWAL provides counsel on an interim basis.

Counsel provided by EQWAL are not external counsel. They are part of the inhouse team, for a limited time. They think and act like experienced inhouse counsel, because they are. Depending on individual needs, they bring either specific knowledge or skills to the existing team, or they simply expand the team’s capacity.

Why EQWAL?

Typically, inhouse workload fluctuates depending on certain projects and regulatory requirements. Sometimes, positions become vacant or cannot be filled as quickly as needed. Staffing an inhouse team to cover any fluctuations is cost prohibitive. As a result, teams are staffed slimly. And work that cannot be covered internally during “peak situations” is given to external law firms. On a regular basis, this concept also applies to work that doesn’t require specialist expertise or the liability coverage of a law firm. The work is outsourced simply because there is no internal capacity.

Law firms, however, are very expensive for several reasons. Due to their time-based billing models, little incentive exists to think pragmatically and act as inhouse counsel. In addition, communication between the legal department and the law firm tends to be inefficient. After all, law firms are external service providers with very different revenue mechanics and without first-hand experience working inside a corporate legal department.

With EQWAL, legal departments can easily scale up and down, depending on their current workload. They no longer need to instruct external law firms with work they would preferably handle internally to external law firms. As a result, legal departments benefit economically while remaining in full control of the quality of their work.

What kind of clients does EQWAL partner with?

EQWAL clients are large global corporations, German “Mittelstand” companies, and high-growth startups. The one element uniting all of EQWAL’s clients is a desire to break out of the traditional binary thinking of the legal function, and to provide high-quality work to organizations in an agile and cost-effective way.

Some clients work with EQWAL because members of their legal staff are on parental or sick leave. Others are working on strategic projects requiring legal expertise which they do not currently have in house. Another significant share is driven by our clients’ desire to temporarily add project management or technology skills to their inhouse legal teams when optimizing legal workflow processes or implementing software tools.

What kind of lawyers are working with EQWAL?

All EQWAL lawyers are experienced in working for or directly supporting corporate legal departments which enables a true “plug & play” approach.

In every other respect, our lawyers are highly diverse. Most have a classic background as German “Volljuristen”. However, we also have qualifications from several international jurisdictions on board, as well as “Wirtschaftsjuristen”, certified data protection and data protection experts, document managers, technology specialists, legal operations experts, and legal professionals with a variety of industry-specific knowledge.

Our commitment to diversity extends beyond formal qualifications. In our recruiting and selection processes, we consciously and systematically pursue diversity best practices. We firmly believe that diverse teams have a direct impact on work satisfaction and work quality.

Who is behind EQWAL?

EQWAL was founded and is managed by a team of legal innovation pioneers. The team includes the founders of the most forward-thinking digital magazine for the legal industry in Germany, the former Managing Director Europe of the world’s largest alternative legal services provider and founder of two of Germany’s first legal tech platforms, and a computer scientist with a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and many years of experience on the intersection of law and technology.