The annual FT Innovative Lawyers competition is the brainchild of Reena SenGupta of RSG Consulting. In 2005, the London-based journalist hit on the idea of ranking law firms based on their innovations and partnering with FT on spreading the word.…
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Perkins Coie’s Toby Brown discusses the importance of trust and communication in maintaining positive relationships between in-house and outside counsel. 

Tell us about your role as Chief Practice Management Officer at Perkins Coie.

Toby Brown: My role really started with – and expanded around – pricing and profitability. As that area became more advanced, it highlighted other needs and demands like legal project management (LPM). I still oversee pricing now, in the sense that pricing is how we win work, and legal project management is how we manage that work in regard to client success and profitability. About a year and a half ago, I also took on the role of overseeing our lateral partner acquisition. It might seem like that’s unrelated to my role as Chief Practice Management Officer, but actually it requires the same type of assessments we make with pricing and practice management.

With the growth of the in-house legal operations community, we hear many references to legal project management. What does LPM look like from the perspective of a law firm? What should our in-house readers know about how law firms are approaching it?

Project management is a function – I liken it to standing in…
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Barnes & Thornburg’s Jared Applegate discusses challenges and ideas for gathering and using data.

CCBJ: Both law firms and in-house law departments look to gain pricing certainty from a better understanding of data related to matters. What type of data should be focused upon?

Jared Applegate: From an in-house law department perspective and, frankly, from a law firm perspective, I think you always want to start with the end in mind. Ask these questions: At the end of the day, what business decisions will be driven by the capture and analysis of the data? Will that ultimately provide greater value/insights to my business unit leaders?  …
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Bjarne P. Tellmann, CLO and GC of Pearson, recently dished up a bit of advice for law departments facing continuing resource restraints…
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DISH’s Mike Burg partnered with iDS’s Dan Regard to build a document repository that allows the legal department to be more consistent across matters and leverage previous decisions on repetitive documents.​

CCBJ: Mike, please describe some of the issues that have been on your radar since you joined DISH.  

Mike Burg:  I’ve been managing e-discovery at DISH just about five years. Currently, we’re focused on becoming more efficient and leveraging technology to…
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Brian D. Moore demonstrates how technology and visibility have cultivated the increasingly broad and sophisticated managed services that providers such as FRONTEO can offer.

CCBJ: How have managed services evolved over the last few years?

Brian Moore: Managed services for e-discovery, and legal services in general, has been an ongoing trend over the last 10 to 15 years. That trend was significantly accelerated by …
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Transparency and collaboration are obvious keys to strong and smooth relationships between inside and outside counsel. Less obvious is the role budgets can play in facilitating such relationships. Here, Jared Applegate of Barnes & Thornburg and Justin Ergler of GlaxoSmithKline share best practices on using budgets as a conversational tool to build better relationships.…
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