How do companies optimise their legal department with interim legal counsel?

Companies optimise their legal department with interim legal counsel by placing temporary lawyers exactly where capacity is missing or specialist knowledge is needed – for vacancies, peak workloads or projects. The core team can focus on strategic work, and external law firms are only instructed on matters that really require them.

This guide is for general counsel, heads of legal and HR leaders in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. It shows when interim legal counsel relieves an in-house legal team, how to set up an assignment in five steps and where the limits are.

What does optimising a legal department mean in practice?

Optimising does not mean cutting headcount. It means using your in-house lawyers for the work only they can do and covering fluctuating demand flexibly. Typical goals are:

• keeping deadlines and response times for the business, even during absences or peaks
• bringing routine work back in-house from external law firms where it makes economic sense
• running transactions, contract migrations or regulatory projects without delaying day-to-day work
• keeping knowledge in the team instead of rebuilding it with every vacancy

Five ways interim legal counsel relieves your legal department

1. Bridging vacancies: Filling a permanent position often takes months. An interim legal counsel takes over the existing portfolio so that contracts, requests and deadlines do not pile up.
2. Covering absences: Parental leave, maternity leave or long-term sick leave can be planned. With a handover period, the legal department stays fully operational and knowledge is not lost.
3. Absorbing peak workloads: Year-end, a reorganisation, a wave of customer contracts or a contract review backlog can tie up the team for weeks or months. Temporary capacity keeps strategic work moving.
4. Adding project expertise: Corporate/M&A, data protection, regulatory projects (for example DORA, NIS2 or the EU AI Act) or investigations require experience that is not always available in-house. An interim specialist brings it for the duration of the project.
5. Controlling external spend: Recurring work such as contract review or day-to-day advice to the business can often be handled more economically by an integrated interim legal counsel than by a law firm billing by the hour. Law firms remain the right choice for litigation, opinions and specialist matters.

Which solution fits which need?

The table is a guide. What matters are the tasks, duration, workload and who leads the assignment.

Staff leasing or freelancing: who manages the assignment?

Alpinum Solutions provides interim legal counsel through two models, part-time or full-time, from a single interim specialist to a project team. Both models suit most needs; the focus is on the right solution, not the contract model.

• Staff leasing (Arbeitnehmerüberlassung in Germany, Personalverleih in Switzerland): the professional is integrated into your organisation and you generally hold the right to give professional instructions. See temporary legal staff through staff leasing.
• Freelancing: freelance lawyers deliver their work independently within a clearly agreed mandate. See freelance lawyers and compliance experts.

In both cases your company manages the assignment: you set the tasks, priorities and reporting line. Alpinum is not a law firm and does not provide independent legal advice; it provides qualified professionals.

Five steps to an effective interim assignment

1. Describe the need: reason, tasks, expected results, area of law, seniority (junior, mid-level or senior), languages, location, workload and duration. One page is enough.
2. Choose the model: integration into your team with your instructions (staff leasing) or a clearly defined mandate (freelancing).
3. Review profiles: interview two or three candidates and check fit, availability and working style. Our RFP checklist with 12 questions for interim providers helps you compare.
4. Prepare onboarding: define system access, a contact person, the handover of open matters and goals for the first two weeks.
5. Secure the results: hold regular check-ins with the reporting line and plan an orderly handover at the end so that knowledge stays in the team.

What this looks like in practice

Two anonymised examples from Alpinum assignments:

• Parental leave cover: an international industrial company in the DACH region brought in a senior legal counsel during parental leave – nine months including a one-month overlap, through staff leasing, reporting to the head of the legal department. The legal team stayed fully operational for day-to-day advice and contract management, and external legal fees fell significantly.
• Transaction: for a cross-border transaction, a senior legal counsel with corporate/M&A experience strengthened the in-house corporate/M&A team of an industrial company for twelve months (full-time, staff leasing), coordinating the legal department, international law firms and local counsel.

By its own count, Alpinum Solutions supports more than 120 assignments per year; its database includes over 7,500 interviewed and vetted legal and compliance professionals (as of 18 October 2026). Selected profiles are usually available within 48 hours; the start date is agreed jointly by the client and Alpinum.

Limits and risks

• No briefing, no impact: unclear tasks lead to long ramp-up times. The more specific the brief, the faster the support takes effect.
• Not a substitute for strategy: interim legal counsel relieves the team but does not replace decisions on the structure and size of the legal department. For permanent additional demand, a permanent hire is often the better choice.
• Plan knowledge transfer: without an orderly handover, knowledge leaves with the interim professional.
• Mind the legal framework: staff leasing rules differ between Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Ask your provider to explain the right model for your country.

Next steps

Read also what causes bottlenecks in legal departments and why it is hard to find good interim legal counsel. For an overview of situations, practice areas and models, see interim legal support for companies. If you have a specific need, discuss it with us.

Information on Alpinum (assignments, database, examples) as of 18 October 2026. Author: Christian Steinmetz, MLaw (University of Zurich), Founder & CEO, Alpinum Solutions.