On Wed, May 19 2021, Legal Decoder hosted the first in series of four webinars focusing on how ALSPs have made significant inroads in the legal industry. The panel included Stephanie Corey, Co-Founder and General Partner at UpLevel Ops and Co-Founder of CLOC; Mike Russell, Head of Global Legal Operations at Expedia Group; Daniel Young, Legal Operations Manager at Boston Scientific; Vince Cordo, Chief Revenue Officer and Head of Legal Ops at Holland & Knight; and Katy Werner, Managing Director of Legal Transformation Services at Epiq. Joseph Tiano, CEO of Legal Decoder served as the moderator for the discussion.

The panel spoke for about an hour about the changes in how law firms and corporate law departments conduct business, and how those changes have led to a steady increase in ALSP engagements.  “They’ve really expanded from what used to be kind of a labor arbitrage play, the basic eDiscovery and document review to what we’re calling legal transformation… and legal business advisory solutions,” said Werner. The panelists agreed that this evolution into services that create value as opposed to just reducing costs is a revolutionary change. As Ms. Corey pointed out, one of the driving forces in popularizing ALSP engagements for low-end workflows was the growing sophistication of specialized legal teams that generate a better return on investment from handling data-intensive tasks.

A large part of the discussion was dedicated to classifying the different types of ALSP engagements and a standard operating procedure for deciding whether to use in-house resources, captive ALSPs, or outsourced service offerings. The panelists agreed that the areas in which an ALSP engagement could extract the most value were contract management, legal research, litigation support, discovery, compliance support/investigations, managed review and data hosting. “ALSP engagements look different to different people,” Cordo said, “maybe you want to prevent an army of people on a project and want to build a relationship with a provider, and that’s were a consulting service comes in.” Cordo further noted that that law firms also bring value on these engagements through staffing assistance or co-project management agreements.

 The panelists concluded that a variety of different types of ALSP engagements, not just data analytics, consulting or task outsourcing is better or more effective than just one of those tools. They believe that the most effective ALSP engagement that extracts the most value out of the matter, is one that employs many point solutions and justifies their relationship with a strong return-on-investment.  Ultimately it was agreed that collaboration really is the key to successfully navigating this new legal business landscape. While the technology solutions are helpful in evaluating the effectiveness of the engagements, the most important factors remain building quality relationships and leveraging those relationships to bring value to the client.

 Legal Decoder is and our offerings for both Law Firms and Legal Departments have proven to be effective tools for evaluating legal business relationships. If you or your organization is interested in learning more about how metrics fit into measuring efficiency in ALSP engagements, we are presenting our next webinar with another all-star panel on June 3, 2021.