A coalition of local government legal teams aims to unite legal resources across London councils and drive down spending on private practice lawyers, the Gazette has learned.

The London Boroughs Legal Alliance (LBLA) will unite the London boroughs of Camden, Hammersmith & Fulham, Harrow, Hillingdon and Hounslow, and the West London Waste Authority. Each authority will share its legal team with the others to prevent duplication and keep the majority of work in-house, while a shared panel of external law firms will deal with work that cannot be done internally.

Other local authority legal chiefs have expressed interest in joining, the project’s founders said. The alliance is backed by Capital Ambition, a government-funded body that finances local authority efficiency projects in London.

Leo Fattorini of consultant Kennedy Cater Legal, which is advising on the project, estimated that the alliance will spend £3.5m a year on its solicitor-panel. The panel will consist of around four large firms for major projects and complex litigation, around four firms for high-volume work, and another four firms to cover for authorities’ in-house teams.

Hugh Peart, director of legal and governance services at the London borough of Harrow, said: ‘We are all going to get zero increases in our budgets for the next two years, but we all have a steady increase in demand for work to be done, so we need to find ways of getting more bang for our buck. We are building a panel of solicitors but our core concern is to use resources better. Sometimes we are all individually doing the same piece of work, and the idea is that we get out of this habit.’

Michael Cogher, assistant director for legal and democratic services at the London borough of Hammersmith & Fulham, said: ‘It’s a matter of giving an in-house client a choice from an in-house lawyer in the borough, an in-house lawyer from another borough, or a private practice lawyer. I really want the client to have a choice of the best lawyer at the best price for any particular piece of work. It’s about quality and value for money. Lawyers and legal services are no exception to that principle.’

Last year 30 local authorities across the country moved to create three ‘super panels’ of law firms and barristers chambers (see [2008] Gazette, 4 December, 1).