Abstract
Legal Departments are usually involved when it comes to Business-to-Business (B2B) disputes. They provide legal opinions on the subject matter at hand, consult on the available dispute resolution mechanisms and are the interfaces to the external law firms.
However, disputes are usually not the companies’ core business, and thus the commercial aspects of solving disputes are predominant for the company. The following article describes how disputes can be looked at commercially and how they can be run as a Business Case. The article also describes the role and responsibility of the Legal Department in such a Business Case, and several Tools that assist the Legal Department in increasing their contribution to efficient and effective dispute resolution.Todays Legal Departments need to add value to their corporations through supporting the business in delivering both a sustainable bottom line and improvements and protections to transactions (Fig. 1).1
This applies especially in dispute situations as any Euro in dispute that has been resolved has a direct impact on the bottom line. Legal Departments can add value to their corporations in dispute situations by focussing on risk reduction and profit maximization rather than running litigations. [105]
Fig. 1 The value pyramid of the Legal Department (Desjardins 2016)
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