Elevate.Together.Podcast.

Creating a Simplified Customer Experience

Late in 2021, Elevate was the first law company to be granted an Alternative Business Structure license in the US by the Arizona Supreme Court. This Expert podcast features Elevate's CEO Liam Brown, our General Counsel, Steve Harmon and the Co-founders and Partners in Elevate's law firm, Nicole Auerbach and Pat Lamb. Crispin Passmore hosts this podcast episode. Crispin has been a resource to Elevate, consulting on our SRA ABS license in the UK and our ABS in Arizona.

[00:49] What is an ABS - and why did Elevate want one.

[03:34] 80% of the work done in corporate law departments does not require a licensed lawyer

[05:14] How did it work? Did Elevate face any challenges with the application process?

[07:05] The ABS license allows us to better service our customers. We can seamlessly

solve a customer’s problem without any elaborate explanation.

[11:36] The most successful lawyers in this model can see the solution from the customer's perspective; they value the multi-disciplinary approach.

[14:17] The ABS license allows for properly integrating the restricted practice of law into our broader law company deliverables. 

[16:13] Today Elevate is an expert-led, technology-powered law company.

[18:02]  As an ABS, is Elevate competing with the traditional law firms of our customers?

[20:42] As law firms exit their ALSPs, their focus will be competing with other law firms and the Big Four for core advice of law business.

[23:24] The emergence of ABS in the US is an important step; it's great for customers, it's great for lawyers, and it's excellent for those that innovate.

Enjoy!

Get To the Point of Peak Value, Then Move On

Please enjoy this Next Normal Leadership series episode featuring Elevate's Chairman and CEO, Liam Brown, talking with Senior Director, Associate General Counsel, Head of Legal Operations at Intel and the president of CLOC, Mike Haven. Liam and Mike discuss the different areas of life that require leadership, the value in followership, and balancing proactive strategic work with reactive tactical work.

[00:44] Say hello to Mike Haven and hear how he’s balancing personal, team, company, and CLOC ecosystem leadership.

[05:21] Eliminate time burning cycles that create marginal improvement.

[07:58] Let’s attack legal waste, start by systematically asking what we should do differently.

[11:04] Focus on your big goals, while completing small ones.

[13:43] Yes, communication is key.

[15:42] Legal operations is bringing corporate law departments and law firms to the table.

[18:00] A tremendous amount of business success is based on the tools, methodologies, and information sharing.

[20:07] Change is hard, be okay with less than perfection.

[22:49] OKRs - Objectives and Key Results

[24:37] Followership defined, learning important lessons from others.

[26:09] The responsibility of professional leadership. People watch, listen, observe, and look at the results you achieve.

Enjoy!

Elevate Is Running a Differentiated Race.

With great pleasure, we share this podcast episode featuring members of the Elevate corporate management team and our functional leadership.  The topics covered stem from Elevate having completed ten years providing consulting, technology, and services in the legal industry, and the occasion of Elevate reaching $100M in revenue, which will occur in 2022.  What is enlightening about the voices you'll hear in this recording is the confidence built on their experience, success and the future of Elevate and the fast-growing legal services business.

Programming Note: Each of our nine participants will introduce themselves at the beginning of the recording while answering our first question, what two words Our CMO and host for this podcast, Nicole Giantonio, will announce each speaker during the recording to aid the listener.

[00:41] When you look at Elevate and our work today, what are two words that describe our contribution to the legal market?

Stephen Allen: Stephen is Elevate's Vice President of Get Shit Done based in the UK. Stephen describes Elevate as collaborative and empowering.

Joyce Thorne: Joyce is Elevate's Vice President of People, and I'm in Michigan in the US. Her words describing Elevate are collaborative and supportive.

John Croft: John is the President of Elevate and is in London. His two words are law company.

Steve Harmon: Steve is in Park City, Utah. He is the General Counsel and Vice President of Global Services. He describes Elevate as an ecosystem that supports integration.

Sharath Beedu: Sharath is based out of San Francisco, California, and is the Vice President and General Manager of the Product Business at Elevate. Sharath's two words are bold and collaborative.

Myriam Schmell: Is the Vice President of Global Sales and is out of the East Coast of the US. Her two words are audaciousness and fearlessness.

Simon Heyrick: Simon is our CFO and is in Los Angeles, California, and his word is practical. We have practical solutions.

Bud Phillips: Bud is in Virginia, United States, and is the CIO of Elevate. When he thinks of Elevate, the words he thinks of are mindful and grounded.

Nicole Giantonio: Nicole is the Chief Marketing Officer here at Elevate. She lives in New York City, and her two words are transformative and smart.

Liam Brown: Liam is the chairman and CEO of Elevate based in Los Angeles, California. His words are deliver differently.

[05:27] Contracting with legal services companies and legal technology is not an alternative. It is the normal way of doing things.

[08:01] Elevate is supporting the movement to recognise the value creators in the legal ecosystem are not limited to lawyers and barred legal professionals.

[09:26] Expert-led technology-driven solutions provide predictability that allows the practice of law to become routinised, standardised, and another part of the delivery chain, the supply chain.

[11:16] CFOs no longer exempt the legal department from managing their spending.

[12:21] It is critical to provide the software scaffolding that allows our customers to work differently.

[16:13] The problem with point solutions.  

[20:12] Legal may be the last - but it's time, following the footsteps of HRO, BPO, ITO, and FSO.

[22:33] Elevate is committed to running a differentiated race. *If you don't listen to anything else,...

Trying to Package Privilege

This podcast episode features Elevate President John Croft talking with the CEO and founder of the 93% Club, Herbert Smith Freehills' associate, Sophie Pender. Sophie describes her background, education experience and the work of the 93% Club to clear a path for legal professionals from non-traditional socio-economic backgrounds.

[00:43] A person's socio-economic background isn't immediately noticeable when you meet them.

[06:27] The 93% Club is a nationwide student charity in the UK that supports state school students at university. Apply named, 93% of the UK population is educated at state schools.

[08:05] For people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, realising people judge others based on their financial circumstances or upbringing is a shock.

[10:04] In 2020, we went from having two 93% Club societies, Bristol and Durham, to just under 50 nationwide. It's now a fully established charity.

[14:15] We're trying to have a conversation about this topic. We need to stop looking at people and valuing them based on their upbringing or how much money they have in the bank.

[15:42] We're not going to change things overnight. While that happens, we want to equip students with the necessary skills to get top employer roles.

[17:12] We work with big corporates with lots of resources and a real drought when it comes to diverse talent to put on skills sessions.

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[18:16] We help our members make connections to further mentorship into sponsorship, but that's not all…

[23:06] Have the life experience conversation. It can be uncomfortable, but it is important.

Rid Your Lawyers of Transactional Work - And Make Your Budget Go Further

We’re pleased to share this Impact Podcast featuring an Elevate customer implementing transformative change. In this episode, Elevate Vice President Jake Hills talks with Strategic Resource Operations, Senior Manager GAT Legal Operations at Intel, Andy Krebs. Andy and Jake discuss ground-breaking legal cost savings initiatives at Intel.  

‘Everyone is concerned about offending their law firms by bringing up analytics. Intel has had the complete opposite experience; law firms are grateful for the feedback and thankful that you’re coming to them with helpful information.’ – Andy Krebs

[00:40] Andy describes three changes Intel is making that are having an impact: Aligning legal ops horizontally across the legal department, reducing the number of outside counsel firms utilized and moving to a flexible outsourcing model.

[03:02] The fundamental issue Intel is looking to solve is the unsustainable year over year increases. 

[04:21] Data, and senior leadership support, helped drive compliance, including meeting Diversity Initiatives.

[07:02] Intel started this journey with 300 plus outside law firms. Today they use under 140 and Outside Counsel spend is down over 10%. In LPO, they see, on average, almost 60% savings. 

‘We see phenomenal talent in this flexible workforce.’ – Andy Krebs

[09:39] Longer-term changes include a retainer model, online technology for bidding on matters, greater examination of cost data, and predictive insights.

[11:49] Intel is making bidding more efficient for firms. Quick, simple, in and out, not 15 rounds of presentations.  

[14:45] The negotiation of rates and fee structures is centralized taking that off the attorney’s plate, which is huge in our effort to preserve our lawyer’s relationships.

[18:14] What’s next for Intel? A centralized workspace, a dashboard, workflows for everything, and full support for data collection.

A Race to the Bottom

Welcome to an Expert series podcast featuring our former colleague and head of our eDiscovery and document review business, John Reikes. John is now the CEO of High Impact, a studio which specializes in litigation-related graphics. On this podcast, John talks with eDiscovery leader Jeff Fehrman, Vice President at Reveal Brainspace.  Jeff and John discuss eDiscovery pricing, flipping the funnel on document review and partnership.

[00:53]  John sets the stage for our conversation, noting a misalignment between how we pay for discovery services and how people value what they've received.

[02:37] If we measure value in risk and people time, why price it by the gigabyte?

[04:31] The number of hours an attorney spends on a matter does not align with the value they've brought to it.

[06:29] Hosting gigabytes are not relevant to either party, so why are we using them?

[08:13] Any additional ancillary value, whether artificial intelligence or applying translation, should be wrapped into one common price.

[11:37] Charge per doc, that's plain and simple.

[16:08] Can we expect success moving to a similar model on the data side of eDiscovery?

[19:10] To charge or not to charge for hosting – it comes down to value.

[23:20] AI drives automation and efficiency and can flip the pyramid – you get the documents you need and set aside the others.

[27:02] Advice to buyers and sellers? Commit to a partnership.

Hours and Hours of Boredom Filled With Sheer Seconds of Terror

Welcome to a special edition of the Elevate.Together.Podcast. Inside the Engine Room, where we highlight the stories and people who help bring you Elevate's award-winning products and services.   Our host for this series is Dr. Daniel Katz, Vice President of Data Science and Innovation at Elevate.  His guest today is our Elevate colleague, Julian Cagadas. 

[00:50]   Let's meet Julian…

[02:12]   Someone has to answer the red phone but rest assured it takes more than one person to 'push the button'.

[04:45] A job at Accenture and law degree start to shape a different future for Julian.

[08:51] Law with a focus on innovation, technology, and business

[10:30] By aligning budgets, people, and technology, we apply process to the field of law.

[11:49] Using AI and NLP, Natural Language Processing, to extract clauses and relevant data fields from legal documents

[13:05] It's an exciting time to be in this area of the business of law. 

ENJOY!

A Legal Team Took on the Might of the Post Office

This Impact series podcast episode features Elevate's Vice President of Get Shit Done, Stephen Allen, talking with James Hartley, the National Head of Litigation and Disputes Advisory at Freeths.  Stephen and James review HUGE complex litigation that resulted in success for the Freeths team - on behalf of a significant group of claimants.  Elevate gets a mention for the AI, data analysis, and document management assistance we provided to accelerate the review of the vast amount of case evidence.

[00:00] Let's jump in.  Stephen introduces James and the case at the centre of this podcast. 

[01:30] Landing the case.  Perhaps 'the case' of the century.

[03:04] A significant investment of time - and the benefit of technology.

[05:02] AI in the context of data analysis and document management, which was essential. 

[08:34] Freeths began to re-think how it does litigation.

[12:00] Creating a more sophisticated approach to analyze litigation risk.

[15:34] Clients don't want to pay for the process. They pay for expertise.

Enjoy!

Technology, Process, Content and People

Stephen Allen, Vice President of Get Shit Done at Elevate, had the pleasure of hosting a talk with Dr. Roger Strathausen and Elevate’s Rob Couch.   Dr. Roger Strathausen is a business consultant and acting Vice-Chair of the Supervisory Board of the Liquid Legal Institute, a non-profit association committed to promoting digitalisation in the legal industry.   Rob Couch is a managing director of Consulting, focused on the contracting and CLM practice at Elevate. Roger and Rob have put together a white paper Elevate is publishing around contract life cycle management trends, why contract, how to contract, and who owns the contract - a wide-ranging series of thought leadership.

[01:15] The tenet of our white paper surrounds three points:   the evolution of contracting today, technology matters, and AI is the future.

[04:40] There is an evolution of technology occurring within the contracting space.  AI is completely changing the rules related to contracting.

[07:30] Contracting started as a handshake and then transitioned to the lawyers for good reasons - contracting and transactions became more complicated.

[09:44]   Technology, templates, and a library of allowed deviations. 

[11:01]    Today CLM tools have AI is part of the original design, built into the technology use case.

[15:16]    Balancing the technical possibility of what can be done with a compelling use case.  

[18:04]    Smart Contracts have evolved because of AI.

[19:19]    What should businesspeople who contract, and lawyers who support them, be doing now?

Enjoy!

Constantly Loop and Improve

Tracey Yurko is the Chief Legal Officer for Bridgewater Associates. Bridgewater is a global macro hedge front located in Westport, Connecticut, with 150 billion dollars of assets under management.

[01:14] Tracey's role, leading the hedge fund legal department.

[04:18] Her role has evolved over the last year.

[06:57] ‘There's a whole bunch of work that needs to get done, we can't ignore it for loftier explorations.’

[07:35]  Place value on innovation. Constantly loop and improve.

[10:00]  Successful personas that have a curiosity mindset, connect with the business and operate digitally.

[12:00]  We can configure everything like a machine.  If you have a good machine, you'll have consistent outcomes.

[13:52] Lawyers getting to their highest and best use through technology.

[16:24] Do you want a bunch of different hammers or a toolbox with different tools?

[18:30] When it comes to diversity, demand more from your law firms.

[20:06] Don't be afraid to ask for mentorship and to seek mentors out.

[22:24] Leadership in tough times requires …