The Vahura View | Counselect Special Edition
This tenth edition of Vahura View is no ordinary one. It’s to share with you a culmination of a dream we’ve had for many years now. It’s to tell you about the rebrand of Counselect, a Vahura affiliate.
Counselect was the first dedicated provider of legal secondments in India. Now, it’s expanded to offer a range of managed solutions in talent, technology, and innovation consulting.
Let’s take it from the top, shall we?
A beginning
For thirteen years, we’ve been solving problems in the legal talent space. In 2011, a bunch of us lawyers and HR professionals started Vahura, with the sole ambition of professionalising 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 increasing complexity of the business environment; talent shared their worries about unfulfilled potential and an unbalanced lifestyle. We realised that these concerns were complementary and not contradictory—a world of distributed, specialised opportunities could only be serviced by distributed, specialised talent.
A commitment to innovate
In 2018, we established the Counselect brand to focus on secondment opportunities. This exploration of non-traditional paths in the legal industry put us in rooms where interesting conversations about the future of legal work were taking place.
We developed a sensitivity for the internal and external pressures that the General Counsel is faced with. We found that talent is jaded but often for reasons that are connected to other aspects—teams are isolated from business reality, technology falls short of its tall promises, workflows are stuck in a low-value loop.
And all this at a time when the rewards for genuine innovation are becoming more and more exponential. We recognised the opportunity for the legal department to break out of old patterns and build something new, nimble, and resilient.
A vision for the future
So we decided to broaden our approach to solving problems. We stepped back and took a holistic view, taking in all the moving parts on the continuum of running a modern legal department.
This approach, we strongly believe, can unlock the transformative potential of the department, turning it from a downside-protecting cost centre to an upside-creating strategic unit.
To bring this vision to life, Counselect has entered a new phase of its mission. After several months of brainstorming, sampling, and piloting, we're thrilled to announce that we’ve launched a suite of consulting and managed services offerings under the ‘integrated solutions’ umbrella.
A bouquet of solutions
As Vahura, we’ve already worked on some consulting projects that went beyond the talent mandate. Now, we are deepening this expertise through the Counselect brand, where our focus will be on raising the profile and value of legal both within and for the enterprise. We’ve also added a managed services capability.
Together, all of this adds up to what we’re calling integrated solutions. Counselect’s new integrated solutions suite is categorised into four distinct offerings:
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 Centre: 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.
A new approach to talent
Rest assured, all this doesn’t mean we’re turning the lens away from talent solutions, which are in our DNA. In fact, we’re doubling down on them.
One of the main goals in Counselect’s new era is to grow our Talent Panel at an even faster pace. We want to attract the best and the brightest, and continue busting the myth that it’s not possible to do genuinely interesting legal work as an independent professional. As we’ve increased our touchpoints with the legal department, we’ve been having many ideas about how businesses can engage with legal talent.
We will continue to fortify our flagship Secondment solution, which has been the fount of many insights on the workings of legal departments over the years. To complement Secondments, we’re launching an exciting new solution called Streams, which brings an innovative plug-and-play approach to legal work. With Streams, freelance legal talent can take up multiple discrete projects at the same time.
To deliver on all this, we’re going through our own metamorphosis. We’ve recently on-boarded several management professionals focussed on the legal domain, all of whom resonate with the mission’s 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.
A fresh identity
We’ve also launched two spanking new websites! It has taken many months of work, and they represent approaches we’ve been thinking and talking about for years now. There’s the client website, which details the ways in which we can help reshape and reimagine the legal department. And there’s a new landing page for professionals, which offers a first step to design a life where quality legal work and the pursuit of personal goals are not antithetical.
Both websites reflect the new brand identity of Counselect—dynamic, innovative, collaborative. Our new logo has a breve sign. It’s meant to represent a crucible and marks Counselect as a place where different elements, people, and solutions come together to form a seamless whole.
We’ve also kicked off a dedicated Substack, where we will post announcements, opinions, and content centred around the business of law. Do read our launch post and consider subscribing to the newsletter to get posts directly into your inbox.
A big thank you
Finally, we want to take this moment to thank you for supporting our journey so far. There is no Counselect without Vahura. The people we’ve met, the projects we’ve worked on, the ideas some of you in the Vahura network have shared with us over the years—the new version of Counselect is a product of all of this.