Client Service Standards
Years ago, in our quest to determine what distinguishes best-in-class client service, we began studying hundreds of “best practices” widely discussed in the profession. We culled a list of five that our experience and discussions with clients have proven offer the greatest impact. We adopted these as our firm’s Client Service Standards to guide each of our engagements.
Client teams
You will have a dedicated team of attorneys, government consultants, and staff for your matters who understand your business and industry.
Upfront commitments
At the outset of each engagement, we will discuss your expectations, including your business objectives, goals, timeline, staffing, budgets, and preferred means for communicating.
Post-matter briefing
We will meet with you to discuss your experience once the matter is complete.
Client visits
We will visit you at your place of business annually at no charge.
Value above and beyond
We will provide value to you above and beyond our legal work by helping you meet your goals, challenges, and aspirations.
Project Management
Our Client Service Standards emphasize our commitment to identifying and meeting client expectations from the very start of every engagement. We begin by discussing with clients their business goals, objectives, budget, and preferred means of navigating the engagement. We seek to size up the challenges and opportunities inherent in each engagement from the start, working with our client, as appropriate, to conduct an early case (matter) assessment. Then we map out and discuss alternative strategies — and trade-offs — for reaching the finish line, each with its own costs. We know our clients want the cost of legal representation to be commensurate with the value achieved, and we work with them to strike the right balance.
Once we land on a strategy, our team leaders work with our firm’s project management professionals, client team, accounting staff, and director of technology to develop a work plan, staffing strategy, and fee structure to achieve the most cost-effective balance of professional and technological resources, both in-house and outside the firm, and to provide the most transparency and certainty to the client.
We are innovators in the use of alternative fee agreements, taking creative approaches to managing entire portfolios of work to achieve better outcomes for our clients at lower costs. Hourly billing is basically “cost-plus” billing — the default option absent better information about economies that could be achieved by grouping and managing similar matters together rather than approaching them on a “one-off” basis. Hourly billing can also be built on arbitrary assumptions about what true costs might be for any engagement. We have taken innovative approaches to pricing significant engagements when we are able to identify and assemble a dedicated team from the outset for such engagements and tailor a work plan to achieve optimum results. We share the savings from our portfolio management with our clients, creating a win-win for them and our firm.
We foster strong relations with trusted third-party vendors to help clients identify and assess expeditiously alternatives available to manage the work on any file. Even more, our tech staff assists clients with their own external vendor management programs to help guard against cyber intrusions.
We deploy state-of-the-art tech tools to facilitate project management and expedite workflow in litigation and transactional matters, including: Ideate, an online dashboard enabling monitoring and data visualization of work in progress against budget, which helps us manage workflow to achieve optimum outcomes.
Practical Law, software for corporate transactions, supported by over 200 attorney editors on staff devoted to investigating such transactions, that facilitates research into deal terms in similar transactions, with supporting authorities, effectively supplanting work that is typically performed by associate attorneys in corporate deals
X1, a software crawler that helps us conduct “social” discovery, browsing social media sites
Contract Companion, an AI tool that helps identify and prevent errors in real estate transaction documents
Relativity, a suite of software for use in predictive coding of documents exchanged in discovery, document review and collection, and data analytics
Litigation Support
We provide highly competitive, in-house alternatives to vendor outsourcing for management of all e-discovery, including predictive coding, document review, data analytics, data hosting, pre-processing, processing in native format, and processing in TIFF format, and we offer for a competitive fee user licenses for our clients’ in-house professionals. Through our services, we have saved clients up to 300% of costs they might otherwise incur, while providing them with superior ability to preserve and organize important data.
Clients prefer to use our firm for litigation support over third-party vendors not only because we manage e-discovery at highly competitive prices, but also because we provide secure data-hosting that competitors may not always offer. Clients prefer to have their data in one place. They trust our firm with their data because we invest strategically in cybersecurity (described more fully below), enabling complete matter life cycle management by our attorneys.
Cybersecurity
We understand that when we manage client data, we must make every reasonable effort to keep it secure. Law firms, however, are prime targets for cyberattacks. An average of 10,000 intrusions occur daily at law firms, and 66% of law firms reported a breach in 2016, according to a survey by IT consulting firm LogicForce. We appreciate the critical importance of safeguarding our clients’ sensitive data. This is why we sought and earned ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification — the most widely adopted information security standard in the world and the highest level of security-related accreditation a business can achieve — in every office in our firm.
Moreover, our Cybersecurity and Privacy Practice and IT professionals collaborate with clients to assist them in developing a seamless strategy and approach to cybersecurity threats that helps them ensure that their own businesses are both technically prepared and compliant with all governance and regulatory requirements. We provide a range of services, including:
- Incident response plan review/updates
- Document retention (physical and technological) guidelines review/assessment
- Physical security assessments
- Data privacy/GDPR briefing and Q&A
- Third-party audits of response, compliance, and post-audit remediation of information security matters
- Secure vendor management program development
- Wire fraud email investigation assistance
- Website defacement investigation assistance
- Phishing awareness, training, analysis, and testing
- Disaster recovery/business continuity planning and assessment
- Project management for infrastructure or operational projects