SEE ALSO:

AdvanceLaw Joins About 30 GCs to Measure Law Firm Relationships
The GC Thought Leaders Experiment
‘Experiment’ to Give In-House Counsel New Trove of Data About Outside Firm Relationships

These are important questions for law firms and clients alike. While large clients spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours a year working with their law firms, firm leaders are making structural, growth, technology, and market-entry decisions that turn on assumptions about what clients want. We believe that, working together, we can provide a helpful road map, suggesting which practices and innovations lead to positive results and strong relationships. Through better information, we hope to move the profession forward.

We are working together with AdvanceLaw to tackle this challenge. This is a real-time experiment testing which in-house practices (e.g., convergence, value billing, competitive bids) and law firm attributes (e.g., firm size and structure, legal project management) tend to produce the strongest relationships, satisfaction, and results. The methodology is fairly straightforward: we are collecting and sharing outcomes and performance evaluations on a wide range of legal matters with AdvanceLaw staff, who are determining which behaviors consistently generate better results. Through a large data set, across our companies, we are moving beyond the anecdotal to measure what really works.

The data set has already grown to represent thousands of matters; as the project continues, it will encompass millions of data points allowing for a detailed analysis of many critical questions. As the results come in, a number of general counsel from our group will author articles offering thoughts on these findings, including practical implications for both clients and law firms.

We know we can’t answer every key question, but we hope this effort will lead to a better conversation among leaders of the legal profession about service quality and innovation. A further discussion of this project can be found in this article, and questions may be directed to [email protected].
Sincerely,

Michael Degnan, General Counsel, Keurig Green Mountain

Timothy Murphy, General Counsel, Mastercard

Jonathan Pearl, General Counsel, Sony Electronics

Amy Olli, General Counsel, Avaya

Damien Atkins, General Counsel, Panasonic North America

Verona Dorch, General Counsel, Peabody Energy

Lawrence Greenberg, General Counsel, The Motley Fool

Scott Offer, General Counsel, Flex

Brian Chevlin, General Counsel, Pernod Ricard USA

Wanji Walcott, General Counsel, PayPal

Michael Finn, General Counsel, Axalta Coating Systems

Rebecca House, General Counsel, Rockwell Automation

Brian Levey, General Counsel, Upwork

Bill Deckelman, General Counsel, DXC Technology

William Sawyers, General Counsel, Del Monte Foods

Jeffrey Sherman, General Counsel, Becton Dickinson

Ellen Maturen, Deputy General Counsel, PulteGroup

Royce Warrick, General Counsel, Solenis

Seth Jaffe, General Counsel, Levi Strauss & Co.

Joshua Sherbin, General Counsel, TriMas

Lee Reichert, Deputy General Counsel, Molson Coors

Kent Bednarz, General Counsel, Shiloh Industries

Alan Tse, General Counsel, Petco

John Nurkin, General Counsel, SPX Corporation

Tom Pastore, General Counsel, Guardian Industries