A practising advocate runs the delivery, not an account manager

Who does your work, who checks it, and who is answerable when it is wrong.

Most outsourcing arrangements put a salesperson between the firm and the people doing the work. Northbound Legal does not. The person responsible for who is hired, how the work is reviewed and whether it is good enough is a practising South African advocate who put her own firm behind this, and whose name is on it.

Adv. Melissa Swanepoel-Jooste

Co-founder, and director of legal delivery

Melissa is an advocate and a director of BridgePoint Legal Consultants in Pretoria, a commercial practice working across corporate, commercial, employment and mining law. Her own practice is in complex commercial transactions and disputes, acting for mining companies, contractors and businesses.

She co-founded Northbound Legal to put that bench to work for firms in England and Wales, and she runs the delivery side of it herself rather than through an account manager.

Director, BridgePoint Legal Consultants (Pty) Ltd, Pretoria

What she is personally accountable for

This is not a job title. Under the agreement between the founders, these sit with Melissa rather than with a delivery manager:

• Who works on your files. Recruitment and management of the practitioner panel, so the person assigned to your firm was chosen by a lawyer rather than a recruiter.
• Whether the work is good enough. Quality control and supervision of every South African practitioner, before anything reaches you.
• Professional conduct and risk. Including the confidentiality undertakings your files depend on.

If the work is wrong, there is a named advocate to take it up with, and she is a shareholder in the company you are contracting with. That alignment is the point.

The bench behind the seats

Delivery is performed by the team at BridgePoint Legal Consultants, which remains the employer of everyone working on your matters and carries the employment obligations that go with that. Alongside Melissa the practice includes a head of legal and a litigation manager with fifteen years of experience managing contested matters, which is the depth that makes cover during absence real rather than theoretical.

South Africa is a common law jurisdiction with a legal education and drafting tradition close to the English one, which is why the work translates. It is also why we are precise about qualifications: our practitioners are qualified in South Africa, as admitted attorneys or advocates, and are not solicitors of England and Wales. Everything we produce is prepared for review and sign-off by your designated supervisor.

The English company you contract with

Your contract is with Northbound Legal Ltd, registered in England and Wales under company number 17402564, and not with the practice in Pretoria. That is deliberate, and it is most of what the English side of this is for.

• English law, and an English court. Your engagement terms, your remedies and any dispute stay in the jurisdiction your firm already operates in. You are not enforcing a contract eight thousand kilometres away.
• The transfer obligations sit here. A UK company is your processor and your counterparty for the data processing agreement and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, so the onward transfer to South Africa is documented from the UK end before you send a file.
• Billing, escalation and complaints are answered here. In sterling, on published terms, under our complaints procedure.

The detail of how the transfer works is set out in full, as is our privacy and data processing notice, which lists the security controls and sub-processors your COLP will ask about.

Why we built it this way

The complaint we heard repeatedly from firms that had tried outsourcing was not about price or even quality. It was that nobody was accountable: work arrived from a pool, the person who did it changed every week, and the only contact was a salesperson who could not answer a question about the file. So we built the opposite. One named person per seat, a named deputy for absence, and a practising advocate standing behind both.