Instant In-house for health and care

Our ‘Instant In-house for Health and Care’ service delivers bespoke legal expertise across England and Wales to NHS Trusts, local authorities, Integrated Care Boards, Health Boards, independent health and care providers, indemnifiers and insurers - on demand, flexible and tailored to your needs.

Ready when you are, our team of specialist lawyers will integrate seamlessly with your in-house legal team, getting up to speed with your organisation’s needs and delivering a breadth of expertise, greater flexibility and certainty of legal spend.

From clinical negligence and personal injury claims to coroner’s inquests, employment, regulatory and public law - our full-service firm has you covered. You get specialist legal knowledge backed by genuine health and care expertise. Choose dedicated support at any level - paralegal to partner - to keep your legal function running smoothly.

Assistant Director, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust Steve Murray

“All of the staff who were seconded to us during this period from your firm have been a credit both to your firm and to the profession …”

The pressures facing NHS legal teams today

NHS and health sector organisations are operating in one of the most legally complex environments in the public sector. In-house legal teams are being asked to do more with less: managing rising caseloads, navigating new legislation, and supporting increasingly stretched operational teams, often with limited headcount and constrained recruitment budgets.

Common pressures we hear about include:

Recruitment and retention challenges.
Rising inquest and claims caseloads.
Seasonal and cyclical demand.
The cost of external panel firms.
Governance and regulatory complexity.

Instant In-house for health and care was built to address exactly these pressures, giving you access to experienced health sector lawyers who can integrate with your team quickly, work to your internal processes, and scale with your needs.

What is Instant In-house for health and care?

The service offers two delivery models. The first is traditional secondment support, providing you with a named secondee who works alongside your team - either at your office or remotely. The second is a dedicated remote team of specialist lawyers, fully set up to operate as a virtual extension of your existing in-house legal team.

The service offers bespoke support tailored to your needs. Need a lawyer on-site or offering remote support? A dedicated virtual team as an extension of your in-house function? A helpline to access specialist legal advice 24/7? We can offer all of this and more, at any level, from paralegal to partner.

How does Instant In-house for health and care work?

The process begins with a brief, free-of-charge telephone consultation. This gives us the opportunity to understand your requirements before we put anything in writing.

Once we understand your needs, we provide a clear proposal covering the scope of work, the bios of the solicitor or team who will be working with you, and a straightforward pricing model positioned to represent strong value compared with locum or agency costs.

From the agreed start date, we integrate seamlessly into your in-house legal service. Your wider team can treat our lawyers as a direct extension of your function, calling on them as they would any internal colleague, from day one.

What services can we offer in Instant In-house for health and care?

We offer a wide range of support, from paralegal to partner level, tailored to your needs, including:

Coroner’s inquests: Full caseload management and advocacy at court.
Clinical negligence, personal injury and employers' liability claims: Full caseload management and liaison with NHSR and other indemnifiers.
Mental capacity and Court of Protection: End-to-end case management.
Full-service specialist legal advice and support including:
- Corporate governance and regulatory matters.
- Contract and commercial law.
- Subject Access Requests.
- Data and public law.
- Mental health law.
- Employment law.
- Property and estates.
Implementing and delivering internal reporting: Thematic analysis, governance and Board reporting on legal matters.
Legal helpline to provide 24-hour legal advice: You are never without legal support.

Delivery and pricing

Our services can be provided remotely, on site or a blend of the two. We can offer support at all levels from paralegal to partner level. Every instant in-house package is carefully scoped and built around your organisation. We can offer hourly or day rates, fixed fees for cost certainty or flexible pricing models to flex around your service needs. Whether you need day-to-day caseload management or a Head of Legal to drive your entire operation, we deliver exactly the right support for your organisation for as long as you need it.

Short- or long-term support, we will deliver exactly what you need.

Download our brochure

Why choose us?

Through Instant In-House for Health and Care, you can access immediate support from any specialism across our full-service national team. Chambers’ “National Firm of the Year 2025” and ranked Band 1 for health and social care, we are trusted advisers to over 100 NHS bodies (acute, mental health and community, ambulance, ICBs, primary care), NHS England, NHS Resolution, MPS, more than 150 Local Authorities and over 250 independent health and care providers. Our team includes a Mental Health Tribunal Judge, a Coroner, a Deputy District Judge and two former NHS Heads of Legal Services with over twenty years' combined experience leading in-house legal teams.

Get in touch to discuss your requirements

Lawyer at Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust Soraya Boloorsaz-Mashadi

[your secondee] “is fabulous and has been a godsend for us … It is a shame we can't keep her on!”

Head of Corporate Governance, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust Tracey Wright

“… has been like a breath of fresh air, she is so positive and is clearly committed to supporting and working with the team to cover this service. The staff in the team speak so highly of her and her work ethic … I have found her ‘can do’ attitude a godsend.”

Assistant Director, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust Steve Murray

“All of the staff who were seconded to us during this period from your firm have been a credit both to your firm and to the profession …”

Head of Legal Services, formerly of Wrightington Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

“… an excellent secondment service … specifically tailored to suit our needs. We have been very impressed by the calibre of secondee and the back up support which includes easy access to the wider Browne Jacobson team, active supervision and frequent check-in meetings with the secondee and Trust to monitor progress.”

Interim leadership of in-house legal function

When their Director of Legal Services resigned, a large acute NHS Trust contacted us for help. We seconded an experienced partner as interim Head of Legal Services for 11 months. He led the in-house team, served as key legal adviser to the Board, and ensured seamless delivery of legal services across all five Trust sites - until a permanent replacement was recruited.

Secondee support: Advisory and Court of Protection

An ICB faced a spike in workload that its existing legal team couldn't absorb alone and contacted us for support. We seconded two solicitors into the team, working remotely and advising on a broad range of matters – from full welfare Court of Protection applications and Re X deprivation of liberty authorisations to complex public law queries. The result: immediate additional capacity, without the lead time of recruitment.

Secondee support: Claims

When unexpected sickness left a gap in their legal team, a health client needed fast, reliable cover. We seconded an experienced Paralegal to work on site within the legal team. The secondee immediately took over a large caseload of pre-action and litigated negligence and personal injury claims —managing them end-to-end. From investigation and evidence-gathering through to witness statements, claimant correspondence, NHS Resolution liaison and governance reporting, our secondee kept everything on track. A Browne Jacobson partner provided supervision throughout.

Legal services: Review and restructure

When both the Head of Legal Services and her Deputy resigned simultaneously, our client faced a critical gap - and an opportunity to reshape the function. We immediately seconded a partner and two paralegals to site to keep the legal function running. The partner conducted a full review of the caseload and service, then presented the Board with a comprehensive options report for restructure. We supported every stage of implementation -drafting job descriptions, designing the interview process and sitting on interview panels. Throughout, our partner led and supervised the legal team while our paralegals provided additional capacity. Once the new Director was appointed, we delivered a structured handover and induction programme to ensure a smooth transition.

Yes. Services can be provided remotely, on site, or as a blend of the two. We have experience providing remote solicitor teams to ICBs facing workload spikes, on-site paralegals to handle large claims caseloads, and remote lawyers acting as an integrated part of an in-house team following a retirement.

Unlike agency or locum arrangements, our pricing is structured to represent strong value and certainty. You receive lawyers who are part of a specialist health and care firm, backed by the full resource of the wider team, with active supervision and regular check-in meetings to monitor progress, not a standalone contractor placed by a recruitment agency.

The service covers the full range of health and care legal work, including clinical negligence, personal injury and employers' liability claims, coroner's inquests, mental capacity and Court of Protection, mental health law, corporate governance, contract and commercial law, Subject Access Requests, data and public law, employment law, and property and estates.

The team can also provide internal legal reporting and Board governance support, as well as a 24-hour legal helpline to ensure you are never without legal advice.

The service is designed to be deployed quickly and on demand. Following a brief, free-of-charge consultation to understand your needs, we will provide a proposal and can mobilise from an agreed start date. In practice, we have placed secondees at short notice in response to unexpected sickness, sudden resignations and simultaneous senior departures - keeping legal functions running without interruption.

The service supports NHS Trusts (acute, mental health and community), ambulance services, Integrated Care Boards, Health Boards, primary care organisations, NHS England, NHS Resolution, local authorities, independent health and care providers, indemnifiers and insurers - across England and Wales.

Browne Jacobson is trusted by over 100 NHS bodies, more than 150 local authorities and over 250 independent health and care providers, making it one of the most widely used specialist health and care legal teams in the country.

Marshal Ahluwalia

Senior Associate

Instant In-house for Health and Care is led by Marshal Ahluwalia. With over 25 years working in the health and care sector, Marshal has extensive secondment experience across a range of organisations, integrating seamlessly into in-house legal and governance teams.

marshal.ahluwalia@brownejacobson.com

+44 (0)3300452829

Nicola Evans

Partner

Nicola is an experienced solicitor advocate and partner in our inquest and advisory team. She has over 20 years’ experience advising NHS organisations, Trust Boards, senior NHS managers and clinicians on advisory and inquest matters in the health and care sector.

Nicola.Evans@brownejacobson.com

+44 (0)330 045 2962