GrayRobinson Launches International Alcohol Lawyers Alliance

TAMPA, FL – January 29, 2015 – GrayRobinson announced today a new service for the law firm’s international alcohol clients, the International Alcohol Lawyers Alliance (IALA). Richard Blau, a partner at GrayRobinson and Chair of the firm’s Alcohol Beverage and Food Law Department serves as coordinating counsel for the IALA, a network of independent law firms and compliance professionals working cooperatively and collegially across all seven continents to fulfill the legal and regulatory needs of the alcohol beverage industry.

As North American counsel for several international alcohol beverage companies, GrayRobinson is uniquely positioned to propose solutions for the global challenges that face industry members operating in multinational markets.  These challenges include increasingly exorbitant legal costs, unexpected regulatory compliance risks, and inefficiencies resulting from the use of disparate counsel requiring greater utilization of their legal departments’ valuable time and resources.

The widely utilized strategy for the management of worldwide counsel is to control costs and oversight of legal services through the in-house legal department. This strategy becomes problematic as the organization grows, because the number of firms needed to represent the organization grows also. Along with additional outside counsel come the variations of billing procedures and formats, languages, management styles, strategies, regulatory challenges and cultural nuances. These variations in turn cause in-house legal departments to spend an increasingly disproportionate amount of time on the administrative management of worldwide counsel instead of focusing on the practice of law and ultimately growing the organization’s bottom line.

GrayRobinson’s solution is the development of the IALA. The Firm invested substantial time, effort and professional resources to develop a group of independent law firms and compliance professionals who can work cooperatively and collegially to fulfill international alcohol beverage companies’ legal and regulatory needs across the globe. GrayRobinson’s role as facilitator of the network is one-stop management of the IALA in order to provide clients with the best and most efficient service. 

GrayRobinson assists and supports the IALA in the development and delivery of requested services through a variety of resources that emphasize consistency, efficiency and reliability including the development of a worldwide database and a dedicated alliance administrator. The management of the IALA is provided at no additional cost to clients. Typically, the international legal spend is less than would be spent by either using one large international firm or contracting separately with scores of independent and unrelated service providers.

For more information on the IALA read the Law360 article, "GrayRobinson Launches Cross-Border Alcohol Group" available to subscribers only, or go to GrayRobinson’s nationwide alcohol beverage microsite at www.gray-robinson.com/alcohol-beverage-practice.