Legal Leaders Exchange - Podcast episode 22

Bringing efficiencies to outside counsel collaboration and the adoption of AFAs

 

This episode of Legal Leaders Exchange is dedicated to the importance of productive, efficient outside counsel relationships, particularly as they relate to pricing and billing. Our Jennifer McIver is joined by Joy Thorpe, Director of Legal Operations at Altria, and Jorge Arevalo, Director of Strategic Pricing at Faegre Drinker, for an insightful discussion about the relevance of communication and trust for both parties, as well as the benefits and challenges associated with alternative fee arrangements (AFAs).

In this episode, you will hear more about:

• Who typically manages each side of the client/law firm relationship and which options work best
• How to ensure that AFAs are successful, including how to determine whether they are working or should be rethought
• The role of creativity and a positive client/firm relationship in pricing discussions
• Methods for legal departments to communicate their priorities to outside counsel, and how firms can respond
• How to strike a balance that creates a win/win relationship for both parties

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Transcript

Greg Corombos

Hi. I'm Greg Corombos, welcome to Legal Leaders Exchange. This podcast series was created to deliver insights on optimizing legal operations for corporate legal and insurance claims professionals. For today's episode. Jennifer McIver, Director of Legal Operations and Industry Insights at Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, invited two legal operations experts. Joy Thorpe, Director of Legal Operations at Altria, and Jorge Arevalo, Director of Strategic Pricing at Faegre Drinker. Together, they will be discussing the importance of efficient collaboration between in-house legal departments and law firms, stressing the relevancy of communication, trust, and relationships between both parties, along with the challenges and opportunities of adopting alternative fee arrangements, or AFAs. Jennifer, the stage is yours.

Jennifer McIver

Thank you, Greg. I'm really excited about today's podcast. Outside counsel collaboration is a hot topic right now. How to build better relationships, the desire to be more transparent with pricing, creating efficiencies. You know, early in my tech career, it seemed to be more of an in-house versus law firm type of dynamic, and depending on the firm or the organization, it felt like it was always one was the alpha dog, while the other was not quite so much the alpha dog. It's been refreshing the last several years to watch a shift in that dynamic, and I really believe it's because of the role that legal ops, for in-house legal departments, and pricing teams, for law firms, have been playing in the dynamic between the two. So really, I should say it's not the hard work for legal ops or pricing teams, but rather the hard work of our guests today. So, I really am excited to bring and to join us with Joy Thorpe and Jorge Arevalo, so thank you for joining us today. Let's talk a little bit about your roles, and we'll dive in. And, Jo, I'd love to start with you, and you know, talk a little bit not only about your title, the company that you're from, because I haven't introduced that yet, but also your pathway to your current position.

Joy Thorpe

Thank you, Jen. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me. It was interesting to hear your opening. I've only been in legal ops for about two years. I've been with my company, Altria for 21 years, and when I came into legal ops, we already had established relationships with our outside counsel. So, for me, it's always been about relationship building and the strength of that relationship. So, everything we'll talk about during this podcast stems from having that deep relationship with the outside counsel, and I don't see it as either one of us trying to be the alpha dog, as you call it. It's about the relationship and working together so that I try to make it a win/win as much as we can. So, to answer your question about how I got here, my background is in finance. I am a CPA by trade, spent about half of my career in the finance department at Altria. I did have the pleasure of going outside of finance. I spent another eight years or so in our HR department, also a little spent in our strategy department. And so now I'm in legal. So, because of my financial background, I think it sets me up for great success in how we do legal ops in that a big piece of what we do is financial management. My team has four individuals, so it's five of us total, and we support about 75 attorneys and legal professional staff in the law department.

Jennifer McIver

Thank you, Joy. And I love your background, and I love how you came to the role that you now have in legal ops. I think that you know, bringing a multitude of experiences to the relationship and to the dynamics is really what's making the shift. And I know, like you said, you didn't hear the alpha dog before, and that really does go back. You know, I started legal tech a good, almost 13 years ago, and it was really a different dynamic when we were asking for folks to implement billing guidelines or to work with our law firms to maybe change the way they're invoicing. So, it's great to hear that for you, at least, it hasn't been that dynamic. I'd love to turn over to Jorge, and Jorge, ask you to do the same, to introduce yourself, talk a little bit, not only where you're from, but also your experience and how you come to the role that you have today.

Jorge Arevalo

Thank you. First of all, thank you for having me and it's very refreshing to have these forums and these platforms to discuss and engage. I think it's something that's really great. And thank you for having me here. I've been with my current firm for like, two and a half years as Director of Strategic Pricing. I think it's really, really good, and I echo Joy’s comments around the relationship aspect. It's all about relationships, and I think it's more about establishing that trust, that we're trying to be on the client's best interest while trying to get to fair outcomes for both of us, right? So as she mentioned, the win/win situation is something that we really strive for. In terms of how I got here, I used to work corporate, and then I moved to a law firm role as well corporate. My background is in finance as well. More specifically, the financial planning area initially, and then I made a jump to legal pricing and another law firm with a couple stints, and back to FDNA. And finally, back to pricing, where I've been there for more than 10 years now, on pricing. It's something that I really enjoy. It provides a lot of creative thought in how to solve the client's needs and how to get to good outcomes. My team is currently composed of seven analysts, including a manager. It's within the firm's innovation team. We find across the industry, there's different places where you can find pricing, and we usually, generally support a lot of partners within the firm to try to come up with pricing solutions to go to the client. In terms of those, we have close to 500 partners, but there's obviously some that come more often to talk to the team or work with the team. And the same goes for clients. I mean, any given year we're working on supporting the needs of 500 clients in terms of pricing, whether they're new, potential, new clients or existing firm clients.

Jennifer McIver

And, Jorge, when you say that you're working with clients? Who do you work with directly? When you're working with organizations or in-house legal teams?

Jorge Arevalo

It depends heavily. And in this world, it's still relationship-based. And primarily for a lot of clients, the relationship is kept between the lawyers really and in some instances, in other instances, when we start getting into that wired situation, I think if we would call it that way, it's usually legal operations folks that we interact with, and generally speaking, that's where we tend to have a lot of the common ground. I don't know, Joy, in your experience, but it's like it's easier for us to talk numbers and discuss numbers than sometimes it could be for some of the partners.

Jennifer McIver

I think I can relate to that Jorge, because I'm an attorney myself, so the fact that you both have finance backgrounds, actually, just really makes me nervous because I do not talk the numbers. So, I think that it's great that you guys are here. And I'm curious, Joy, who do you work with when you're working with with law firms?

Joy Thorpe

Yeah, I was sitting here laughing to myself, because our legal ops, we try our best not to let our attorneys talk numbers. They have delegated that task over to me and my team, so we handle all rate negotiations. And typically, Jen, we are talking initially to the relationship partner. So, every outside counsel, we assign a relationship partner, and that's who the conversation starts with. So, it's either me or someone from my team having that initial rate counter conversation with the relationship partner. Now my understanding is the relationship partner at the firm reaches out to someone like Jorge and their pricing director and department to actually talk numbers. So, if we're negotiating a new hourly rate, if we're trying to set up an alternative fixed fee arrangement, we initially start that conversation with us, legal ops, and the relationship attorney.

Jennifer McIver

So, Joy, you just said that the magic word, or I should say the magic acronym, AFA, alternative fee arrangement. And I'd love to dive into that a little bit. And the reason I say this is because, again, for 13 years, I've been working in legal tech, and I hear a lot of buzz around wanting to do more AFAs. And yet, when you look at surveys, I've seen surveys that suggest only 5% of outside counsel work is AFAs. Now some surveys are higher - 20% - and I know, Joy, that your team, in some cases, is even higher yet. So I'm going to have you pause on your response to AFAs. And I'm actually going to toss this over to Jorge, and just from the law firm perspective, how do you approach pricing and AFA proposals, Jorge?

Jorge Arevalo

The initial step, honestly, is always to try to understand the client's needs and working creatively to meet those needs. I think there's different drivers of why a client may ask for an AFA, and I try and understand that, and even if they don't ask for it, maybe, maybe sometimes throwing it as an option. I think it's very important to throw options, but it's always centered around the client needs. And what are the clients trying to accomplish? It may not even be explicitly stated, but try to respond to those things. Ultimately, we want our clients to get an experience of the value that we can provide, and it all starts with a solid understanding of the needs, but also understand the scope of work and what success looks like for them. I mean, you can get incredibly creative with different AFAs. I mean, fundamentally, they're the same building blocks, but you can get creative with them in order to like… with risk, say callar fees, or other aspects where we can try to address those needs for the client.

Jennifer McIver

I think you hit the creative word. And I like that, Jorge. And I like that because, Joy, this is where I definitely want to talk through how Altria works with rate proposals and rate negotiations. You've explained to me, you know, when we met beforehand, that you have outside counsel guidelines that provide a window of opportunity to submit rate proposals, but you also take a little bit of a different approach with some target law firms. Can you talk a little bit about maybe potential letters that could come from the general counsel?

Joy Thorpe

Yes. So, in our outside counsel guidelines, we specify that we will accept any rate proposals once a year, and that's typically in the month of November. And before that, a letter goes out from our general counsel to what we consider our core firms, which are typically our highest bin, top firms, and the general counsel says, to Jorge's point, what is our strategy for the upcoming year? You know, a lot of times it we want to manage costs, so whether that's increased predictability of cost, whether that's reducing costs, so, that would be an element in his letter. And he asked to use those exact words, sometimes be creative, continue the use of either volume discounts, think about whether your work is conducive to an AFA. All of that is spelled out in the letter, saying exactly what we expect in these rate proposals that we get followed up with that.

I know last year, I personally had a conversation with the relationship partners, to give a little bit more context behind that letter. And you know, we were shifting resources for 2024 so I was really clear about we cannot accept a very significant rate increase. We just can't do it in 2024. So again, asking for them to be creative in the use primarily of AFAs. So, what we had is we had a firm that came in, one of our larger top firms, came in with the proposal of an all-in fixed AFA. We never did that before, and this is a firm that is pretty active in all of our practice groups. And so it was a very large AFA. Again, it's simply a dollar amount we divided by 12, and that's what they get paid every month. Now, we are very data driven in how we make our decisions, and so we did a lot of work, a lot of analysis to see what were the actual costs in the previous few years. What is any new work coming up? Because what this did with this AFA is it also allowed the firm to get introduced to new work. So we had some bodies of work that were covered with the AFA, but the understanding was everything you do for us would be covered in this AFA. Now this goes back to the relationship building. We had a very strong relationship with this firm, so we trusted each other that if anything significant comes up, we will adjust the AFA. It's not a set it and forget it. You know, you make adjustments. Luckily for us, we didn't have to make any adjustments, and they did pick up some new work that they allowed to just be covered in the AFA. But bottom line for us really on AFAs is really this sense of predictability for cost and then being able to adjust if things go a different way.

Jennifer McIver

So with the letter coming out from your general counsel asking to be creative, Joy, out of curiosity, were you surprised when the law firm came back with an all-in AFA?

Joy Thorpe

Yes, I was!

Jennifer McIver

I love that. And to me some of it, and I keep saying over and over in my mind, when I talk to corporate in-house legal departments, and they're they struggle with getting AFAs started, I always think, just ask. You know, it's kind of like a teenager. My kid is always wanting to go places, but he never asked me, and then he gets mad after the fact that he hasn't went somewhere. And I'm like, but you never asked.

Joy Thorpe

Exactly. All they can do is say no.

Jennifer McIver

Exactly or not be so creative with regard to this. Whether it's the all-in AFA or AFAs in general. Joy, I'd love just to get your take about guardrails being put in place. Are you afraid that you're going to overpay a law firm if you get this all-in AFA, and that it's really not going to save money or cut costs the way that you would have expected it to? And how do you deal with that?

Joy Thorpe

Yes. So in times of shifting resources, yes, I am very afraid that something's going to go awry or we're going to overpay. So, what we do is we ask for shadow billing that is required, and we monitor that. So, people on my team are monitoring the shadow billing, which is the firm's actual time spent versus what we are paying them. And then we meet with our practice group attorneys, in-house attorneys quarterly and report out. And if we see discrepancies, then we have a conversation. Sometimes it's timing and work ebbs and flows, and that's understandable. But if we've had history, year over year, of what we call unfavorable AFAs, then we have a conversation. And we've done that. We have had conversations where we adjusted AFAs or canceled AFAs if they're not working. So, the other thing, particularly with the large AFAs, the all-in AFA I talked about, we established a collar. And what that means is, if shadow billing was coming in way under – more than the collar, for this case 10% – if it was coming in less than that, then they would pay us back. And if it's coming in over that 10% over, where the firm was getting short sided, then it would revert to hourly billing, anything over that collar. So we wanted to try that particularly, that was the first year, and it was so large, and it worked for us. And, you know, it gave the firm the ability, like I said, to participate in some new work, which actually ended up being larger this year. And so they added that into the 2024 AFA. So it's a win/win again. We're trying to make sure that it is a win/win. Sometimes it comes out perfect, but it rarely comes out to where you hit the number exactly right. So, there will be a little one way or the other every year, but hopefully it's not anything significant.

Jennifer McIver

And I think that goes to trying to work out what's best for both sides. And in that context, though, I do want to hit the shadow billing. You say that, and I feel like listeners may cringe. And in-house legal teams love shadow billing. And then sometimes I see on message boards, conversations, especially from legal service providers saying it's an AFA, we're trying to go for efficiency here, shadow billing is not going to provide us the same efficiency. So before I ask Jorge his thoughts about shadow billing, one question I do have for you, Joy, is with regard to shadow billing, are you monitoring it just like you would any other invoice with regard to billing compliance? So, rates, what you do and do not allow billing for, those types of items?

Joy Thorpe

Absolutely. Jen, I will try not to get into the weeds, but yes, the shadow billing comes through our e-billing system. In fact, that is the detail that we get. The AFA comes in as a one liner, you know, a specific task code with no detail, but the shadow billing comes in. That's how the in-house attorneys are reviewing the invoice that has the timekeeper detail, that has the diversity information that we need. Another reason why we collect shadow billing, that's the only way we can get diversity information, because we record that at the timekeeper level, and then they net the fees – there’s an adjustment, and the fee part is netted is how that works. But that is the line item detail that the lawyers, our in-house attorneys, are reviewing to make sure that the work is accurate, being performed at the correct level, and then, obviously, at a quality that that we want.

Jennifer McIver

Thank you for that explanation. And now, Jorge, I definitely have to turn it to you, because, like I said, I've heard, I've read, I've even been on panels, where there's definitely been some great back and forth with regard to the shadow billing. So, from your perspective, or from Faegre’s perspective, what are your thoughts when you negotiate an AFA and you're asked to do shadow billing, and do you think that negates efficiency?

Jorge Arevalo

So your last piece of the question, I guess the answer is always It depends. Piggybacking on what Joey said. I mean, if you're going into a collar situation, well, you have to do it right. Otherwise, there's no comparison point. And I think we understand how, why, the client may find value in shadow billing and other aspects as well. Primarily, also, is it's familiar, right? I mean, it's something that's familiar, and I think that's why we understand the client finds value now with the changes of the advent of more efficient ways of servicing legal work and how that continues to evolve. I think perhaps shadow billing would become less important for our clients, and it would be more about putting the focus on the value of the end result, right? It's something that I see as an evolution or an evolving path. So it's part of that that situation, and again, it will be dictated by the client's needs regardless, right? But it's something that will depend, right? And will depend on the situation and the case and the scenario that we're trying to solve for.

Jennifer McIver

I think that's fair, and I also think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but when I think of AFAs, it's not always necessarily an alternative fee arrangement for an entire matter. It could even be for particular pieces of work. And so, when you get into those pieces of work, that's where potentially shadow billing might not make as much sense, because you're delivering that one piece of work.

Jorge Arevalo

That's correct. I mean, it might be situations where either it could be a small or a big piece of a particular matter, where the entire matter is being billed on an hourly basis, but there's this particular piece of work that we're doing in a fixed fee, or you name it, different types of AFA. For that, it might be, well we agreed on this and we're taking on and that's about it for the overall. And it's also, I think, a situation of communication. It boils down, as well, to communication, that relationship, as we talked earlier about between the firm and in-house counsel. Again, it depends.

Jennifer McIver

I think that's totally fair. And I think, Joy, you brought up even the point about diversity and wanting to collect that data at the time keeper level, the matter level. And I think just with data being so important, especially as we're moving into even more AI- and Gen AI-driven work, having that data there from both sides, both from the law firm side and the in-house, I think that even as we move forward and, Jorge, I agree, I think that there's going to be a place moving forward to more of that project type work that chunking it out and just having one price for it. But I do see needing a solution in order to come up with, how do we still have the data, and how do we report on it? And maybe it's separate from invoices, and definitely not here to solve that today. But I think that that's a great way to say it depends, and the communication is absolutely, I mean, that's the purpose of talking today. If we look at AFAs a little bit more, I referenced it earlier, but surveys really show adoption to be low and somewhat across the board. In adoption, I've seen 5%, 8%, 20% in some surveys this year. And I'm just curious, with the work that you're doing, Jorge, do you see those percentages being about right? Is that close to what Faegre is seeing? And do you think that there's a reason why that adoption rate is so low compared to the fact that so many in-house legal departments really are looking to leverage AFAs for efficiencies and predictabilities?

Jorge Arevalo

What we're seeing is we fall in line with those averages that are reported in surveys. I think that's pretty common to see. On the side of the adoption rate, there may be a part of it comes to the options that are provided. I mean, you provide an AFA as an option, you also get the hourly with whatever rate arrangement you have with your client. But ultimately, the final choice in the hands of our clients, and we still find most of our clients choose hourly, most likely sometimes, because it's familiar, right? It's a familiarity aspect of it, but it also depends on how well we can get to an agreement. What's in scope, how clear is it defined? But also, I think that's part of the roadblock, because I don't really want to call it a roadblock, I think it's working on that communication and that clarification of things. I think that that could go a long way, on both sides, I think that could make a huge difference on that AFA adoption

Jennifer McIver

And with that, Jorge, just out of curiosity, you mentioned familiarity, and I think of that also as comfort, right? And going out of your comfort zone. Especially legal ops, needing to report back the savings, really taking that leap of faith, that this is going to create more savings or cost control or predictability. Do you think that there's any specific type of work that you see as easier to, or should I say, is more comfortable to engage in a discussion and ultimately create an AFA for?

Jorge Arevalo

Yeah, I think the low hanging fruit, if you will, is whenever you have some work that's consistent and repetitive, in a way. That's, for me, the low hanging fruit. I think it becomes more complex to come up with an AFA that makes sense for both sides when you have a lot of unknowns, right? I mean, if there's different potential outcomes that can drastically change the direction of a particular matter, or particular work, it's very hard to account for this. Now that doesn't mean we cannot do it. We can lay out the different building blocks, almost like a decision tree for the client to see. Okay, if we go this route, it'll be this, and if this happens, it's this. And if we can break it into those chunks, I think it might be easier to digest, really, than just throwing out a number. I think that's important, and it comes back to that outcomes piece that I mentioned earlier, right? What is the outcome that we're looking for, or potentially trying to go for, following that path? I think that can help a little bit, and it bridges a little bit that gap on the familiarity of things, I think.

Jennifer McIver

I love your use of the term, or your description of providing a decision tree. I think that for a lot of in-house legal teams, younger legal operations teams, that are looking to explore AFAs, that type of communication, that type of transparency, and that type of collaboration is huge. So if you don't mind, I might actually use that later on, or I might come back to you on that at other times outside of this podcast, because I think that that's really huge.

Joy Thorpe

Jen, I just want to add something to that, I definitely agree with Jorge, because if it's overly complicated, to me, it doesn't make sense, right? Because you both have goals that you're trying to get out of this, and if you have to keep adjusting it, or the decision tree has too many branches, it just becomes very difficult to manage. And we've had those, too, particularly with volume discounts, and it meets this threshold, then this but only these matters, and it just becomes a nightmare to manage. So at the end of the day, I agree with what Jorge was saying in that some work just isn't conducive to AFAs. And I don't think, if they're very unpredictable, I don't think you should force it. It just becomes very hard to manage.

Jennifer McIver

So some types of work are not good for AFAs. Joy. I'm going to have to bring this up. We've talked about the work that Altria is doing with AFAS. And so many love to hear about the successes. I think we often learn from what some may call failures. I actually think it's step forward in learning. But has that happened with Altria? Have you found an AFA maybe that hasn't worked, or a type that just didn't work, and how did you resolve that?

Joy Thorpe

So yes, we actually had several this year that over time, again it goes back to the data analysis, It just wasn't working. And they were providing shadow billing, so we were able to see that it wasn't working. In both cases, we ended up having a conversation with the in-house attorney. We showed them the data. They said, wow, okay, clearly, that isn't working. And we asked, are you okay if we have a conversation with the firm? And they were like, yes. So, we had a conversation with the firm, and they were like, okay we got it, we aren't in this to get over on you, so, as we started this conversation, Jen, and so we decided to end it. And it was Q1 because we did our quarterly analysis and we realized it after having overpaid in the year before. And so we just said at this time, either we can rework the AFA to a lower amount, or we can just go to hourly billing. And in both cases, we decided that, because of how the work was flowing, that it didn't make sense to come up with a new number, that we would just revert to hourly billing. And we've done both of those AFAs for many, many years. So again, it's about that relationship. Everyone agreed that obviously it just would have been working for both parties. And so we went back to hourly.

Jennifer McIver

Joy, I do really, really appreciate you sharing that. I think it's important, and the fact that you had the relationship, were able to take a step back, have the conversation, and then move forward. And it didn't hurt the relationship, from what it sounds like. And I think that that also gets back to, I'm just taking it really simple here to just ask, type of piece of information. Or at least for me, that would be the one suggestion I would give if anyone who asked me, I want to do AFAs.,I don't know how to get started. Just ask. Just ask your law firm,

Joy Thorpe

Right, and then you wouldn't know if you didn't have shadow billing, right? I understand the firm's angst around providing it, but from our perspective, how would we have known that that wasn't working? We wouldn't have if we weren't collecting that shadow billing, if the firm wasn't submitting it in a way that we were able to use it to compare, then we would have never known, and we would have went forever, overpaying. And this was significant dollars that we were overpaying to both of those firms. And I don't know if they knew it or not, but they knew it when we brought it to their attention. And they were able to say, because they value the relationship, you know what, you're right, that's not what we're doing. So let's just revert back to hourly.

Jennifer McIver

Okay, on the record point for shadow billing. But in all seriousness, I do think that it is time to wrap up here. And I think this has been a wealth of information, and I love listening to the idea of relationships and collaborations and just sharing information. Jorge, out of curiosity, if a corporate legal department was struggling and on its list of priorities and initiatives, one of them was to improve outside counsel relationships with regard to pricing, what is a thought or an insight that you can offer to that in-house legal team?

Jorge Arevalo

That's a good question. I think that the initial thought I have about that is go deeper in the relationship in terms of, as we mentioned earlier, usually the initial point of contact is between lawyers and the relationship partners, right? But it's like, to the extent that there's folks like Joy that are legal operations, it may make more sense to connect directly with the pricing folks. As we mentioned earlier, we talk numbers, right? We're very comfortable sitting around those. It's almost like we're speaking the same language. It might be easier to enhance that relationship and make it stronger, right? I mean, it’s just wiring the organizations more. I think it will enhance collaboration, enhance success at all levels across both organizations. I think just that increased wiring between organizations in that level. I think, going a little bit deeper would be an idea behind that.

Jennifer McIver

I like that and joy. Do you have anything to add?

Joy Thorpe

Interesting! What I've learned from this call, Jorge, is I'm going to now ask to just speak directly to the pricing director. Why go through the middleman? But the other thing I would add, Jen, is to improve outside counsel relationships. And you've said it over and over again, have the conversation. Ask. Jorge said it. What are you trying to get out of this? What are your goals? And it's good to talk about that, right. And not through an email. Get on a Teams or Zoom call or get on an airplane and go visit. We actually have face to face conversations with our core firms, and we talk about spending and rates and how much of the time the dollars that we give them are through an AFA, and how much is through hourly billing. And are there any opportunities there? I will now ask for the pricing person to be there at those calls, so have those conversations. And to your point, just ask and get clear on what your goals are, what is your strategy, and what do you want to accomplish, and I'm pretty sure you can come to what I call a win/win situation.

Jennifer McIver

Thank you, and I absolutely agree, and I really appreciate both of you providing insights today. Having the conversation, transparency, setting expectations, and making sure that you're speaking with the right individuals – I think those are all great takeaways. And just go forth and try it. You know, if it doesn't work, it can actually be reversed or you can go back to the hourly rate. And I think those are good things to know and to help make things more comfortable when it comes to in-house legal teams, looking forward to trying AFAs or trying more AFAs. So again, thank you so much, Joy. Thank you so much, Jorge. I really appreciate your time today. It's been just a wealth of knowledge and insights.

Greg Corombos

Those were the words of Jennifer McIver, Director of Legal operations and Industry Insights at Wolters, Kluwer ELM Solutions, Joy Thorpe, , Director of Legal Operations at Altria, and Jorge Arevalo, Director of Strategic Pricing at Faegre Drinker. This podcast is hosted by Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, the market leading provider of enterprise legal spend and matter management, contract life cycle management and legal analytics solutions. For more information and additional guidance, please visit wolterskluwer.com or call 713-572-3282. Please join us for future podcasts on optimizing legal operations and achieving your legal and business goals.