Which? Four years on, and still trusted with the hard problems

Client Profile

Which? is the UK’s consumer champion: testing products, reviewing services and campaigning for people to get a fair deal in the marketplace. It is a large, complex organisation with a legal team sitting at the centre of everything the organisation does, from commercial contracts to one-off corporate transactions. For four years, Obelisk’s Ad Hoc service has been how that team gets the right lawyer, for the right brief, whenever one comes up.

The Challenge

Which? first came to Obelisk in the summer of 2022 with a straightforward commercial contracts problem: increasing work volume needing a flexible quality legal support solution. Over the following four years, Which?’s legal needs evolved, requiring both general commercial support as well as more specialist legal input. A financial services query would land one month, a paralegal gap the next, then more senior expertise. Building an extension of an in-house team, capable of fast response as needs arose is what Obelisk was set up to do. We recognise that no client wants to re-explain their business to a new supplier every time the brief shifts.

The Solution

This is exactly the problem Ad Hoc is built to solve: ongoing, on-demand legal support that flexes across whatever practice area the business needs next, without locking Which? into a fixed team or a fixed scope. There is no single specialism to commit to in advance. When a request lands, Obelisk finds the right lawyer for that brief, and the relationship simply continues from there.

Nine lawyers have been working with the client in this way, each brought in for the specific skill the moment demanded. That matching discipline is the whole point of Ad Hoc. Which? was never buying a lawyer. It was buying the right lawyer, on demand.

The Engagement

The relationship opened with commercial contracts work in 2022, and broadened steadily from there. By 2023, the relationship had broadened to include financial services expertise, with Obelisk fielding a query that needed sector-specific knowledge rather than a generalist’s best guess.

Paralegal support followed, giving the in-house team extra capacity at a more junior level without the overhead of a direct hire. Further commercial roles followed steadily through 2024 and into 2025, keeping pace with a legal team whose needs rarely stayed still for long. Most recently we have been supporting on strategic legal work, the kind of instruction a General Counsel only hands to someone they already trust, on a matter with real commercial weight behind it.

What Obelisk Delivered

Ten jobs across four years, 1,260 hours delivered by nine lawyers working ad hoc across commercial contracts, financial services, paralegal support and now corporate investment structuring, is not the record of a supplier being used for whatever is left over. It is the record of what Ad Hoc is built to do: give a legal team a way to bring in exactly the right expertise, exactly when they need it, without committing to a fixed team or a fixed scope up front.

For Which?, that has meant no delay when urgent work lands, no cost of a permanent hire for work that ebbs and flows, and no loss of institutional knowledge between engagements, because the relationship, not any single lawyer, is what carries forward. It has also meant a legal team willing to hand Obelisk its hardest work, not just its overflow: the clearest measure that Ad Hoc has earned its place as trusted infrastructure, not a stopgap.

That is the value of Ad Hoc done properly: it provides a bench deep enough to match any request, on demand, built around a relationship long enough that the client stops having to explain themselves.​

About Ad Hoc Services

Ad Hoc is one of four ways Obelisk works with clients, alongside Secondments, Overflow, and fixed-price Projects. It is the model built for legal teams whose needs change faster than a fixed team or a fixed contract can follow.

Obelisk Support is a multi-award winning, B Corp certified company providing clients with an alternative delivery model for legal work: agile, responsive, and cost-effective. Human First.