Stretch Beyond, Together at LMA 2022
April 07, 2022
ALSPs Client Experience customer journey efficiency legal industry
This year’s LMA Annual Conference was a great success. With the theme of Stretch Beyond, Together, the 2022 LMA Annual Conference fostered a unique connective and collaborative environment with unparalleled educational content that moved the industry forward and provided meaningful opportunities to stretch current thinking and capabilities.
As part of the educational content, Elevate Experts Kunoor Chopra, VP, Legal Services, and Nicole Auerbach, VP and Partner, ElevateNext, both took part in separate sessions in their legal areas. Below are session recaps and reflections from LMA 2022.
Nicole Auerbach joined the session: Going All-In on the Client Experience — Using Client Journey Mapping to Deliver a Better Client Experience and Drive Revenues on a Small Budget to discuss going all-in on improving the client experience to drive revenue and learning how to do it on a tiny budget.
This hands-on session focused on the customer journey. During one stage of the session, in-house guests asked a series of questions to the panel members concerning their experience in using outside counsel. The exercise required the participants to listen to the story, ask questions to gauge where the expectations differed from the outcome, and then come up with solutions that could have been employed to change the perspective of the customer.
Overall, the panelists came up with very good ideas and they also learned how to map expectations versus the outcome so they could see where there were gaps.
Later in the conference, Kunoor Chopra joined the panel for the session: What Are ALSPs and What Are the Threats? And What Might Be the Opportunities?
The session aimed to define ALSPs and differentiate the different types; introduce the concept of “everyday legal work,” and discuss the different types of work that are ripe for moving to ALSPs to help attendees evaluate the extent to which ALSPs are a threat – and to what extent they can be leveraged into opportunities.
Kunoor joined Tess Blair of Morgan Lewis and Brad Blickstein of the Blickstein Group and Baretz+Brunelle. The session started out with all three panelists disagreeing on what to call ALSPs. Kunoor referred to law companies like Elevate who sit next to law firms to support law departments and law firms, while Tess took a narrow definition of captives but agreed to refer to what her firm had built as a captive for purposes of our discussion.
To break the session up, a version of the 70’s game show Card Sharks was played, and hosted by Brad. He asked Deb Ruffin, one of the organizers of the LMA 2022 Conference, to share her guesses about law company-related statistics and then asked the audience to guess whether the real number was higher or lower than Deb’s. Although Deb was quite optimistic about law departments’ use of law companies (80% compared to her guess of 72%), she didn’t realize that 79% of law firms were also using them (she guessed 40%). It was very eye-opening to hear that Tess was one of the first law firms to bring eDiscovery and document review in-house into a captive ALSP to thwart the competition from other law companies who were providing these services.
She has expanded the firm’s captive to provide services both to internal and external customers which standalone law companies provide including regulatory and transactional support. Kunoor advocated that law firms and law companies really have the same end goal and customer, and should work together to bring more efficient and effective support to customers who are looking for providers to look out for their best interest. All in all, an educational, entertaining, and informative discussion.
With these and other panels, the 2022 LMA Annual Conference delivered new insights and actionable information that attendees are sure to leverage going forward.
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