Competitive Collaboration
How to Create Your Own Legal All-Star Team
October 2013
Lynn Kappelman, Seyfarth Shaw LLP
Katherine Perrelli, Seyfarth Shaw LLP
[client or consultant]
Today
We will:
• help you think both creatively and practically on how to generate
greater value and success with your legal provider relationships;
• explain how you can eliminate traditional competitive boundaries
across your law firms and other service providers to form
specialized, high-performance work teams;
• share some examples of success;
• help you learn collaboratively today with your peers.
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What is Competitive Collaboration?
• We are starting to see it everywhere:
– One retailer collaborates with another to give out coupons
or gift certificates and drive more customers into both;
– One doctor collaborates with another to provide high
quality specialized care in a specialty area or jurisdiction
where only one is licensed;
– One contractor works with another to bid on a job that is
too large or too complex for either of them to service.
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How Can In-house Lawyers Use Competitive
Collaboration To Their Benefit?
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Create a ‘virtual law team’ designed to deliver results for you in a way no single
provider could;
Bring together in-house staff, outside counsel, and/or related service providers;
Choose the team members who have tailored skill sets for a given case,
transaction or portfolio;
Devise knowledgeable team which is dedicated to company’s business and its
processes and effectively co-manages cases/transactions;
• Ensure that team is willing to share
skills and information and partner
with traditional competitors as
teammates
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Why pursue competitive collaboration?
• Ensures greater value from service providers;
– Cost-efficiency, reduced litigation docket, shorter cycle times
– Improved risk mitigation, overall service quality and consistency across
your service provider team
• Encourages creative thinking, innovative solutions, shared learning;
• Elevates role of in-house counsel from gatekeeper to leaderstrategist;
• Creates stronger cohesive relationships among service providers for
you, your team, your company;
• Just possibly, delivers more fun and fulfillment for everyone
involved.
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Stages of competitive collaboration
Reactive
Pro-active
• Management in the
moment
• Planned and deliberate • Organizational,
effort to design and
institutionalized way of
lead team
working:
• Situationally driven
• Most likely mattercentric
• Ad hoc team – playing
the hand you’re dealt
• Little or no team
infrastructure eg,
communications
platforms, tools,
common best practices
• Can be matter,
transaction or
portfolio-centric
• Creates or utilizes
some degree of team
processes and
infrastructure (e.g.
online collaborative
platforms)
Way of Life
DuPont Legal Model
Pfizer Alliance
FMC ACES Model
• Preferred Law Firm
structure
• Predefined agreements
• Well-established
infrastructure and
processes
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Real-life success stories involving Seyfarth
• Multi-plaintiff trials for two different large corporations in Texas and West
Virginia
• Managing a ‘virtual law team’ of independent, regional and national
lawyers on a portfolio of hundreds of IT procurement contracts
(Transaction Solutions Center)
• Leading a national team of right-priced legal providers to deliver a
comprehensive solution for an ERISA litigation portfolio on behalf of a
leading insurer
• Partnering with a global law firm (U.K.-based) to help their clients with
U.S. law, including M&A issues, wage-and-hour, executive comp,
environmental and more
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How Would You Design This Collaboration?
Team? Tools?
• You are the head of litigation of an east coast retailer and
you have a class action consumer fraud case pending in
state court in West Virginia. The Plaintiffs’ attorney is a
well-respected class action litigator who has a good
relationship with the local clerks and the Judges, and a
successful track record on these class action cases. Your
Boston firm does not have a West Virginia office and word
on the street is that it is a very parochial jurisdiction. What
are some reasons you might want different law firms to
collaborate in representing you? What are the challenges
and how might you facilitate this? How would you
approach a collaboration of competitors?
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Keys to leading a successful collaboration
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Carefully select your team members—by skill and personality;
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Set up regular team meetings to ensure unified strategy and collaborative
planning--process mapping;
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Employ technology and other tools that make communication and information
sharing easy;
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Regularly review and agree on allocation of responsibilities and evaluate
efficiencies;
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Create rewards systems for collaboration;
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Challenges to navigate
• Team members who refuse to communicate or
align on client goals, group objectives-my way or
the highway approach;
• Team members who resist sharing intellectual
capital, or vie for client attention and approval;
• Inter-firm and/or interpersonal competitionbackstabbing;
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Challenges to navigate
• Incompatible technology between service
providers;
• Failure to align best practices to ensure
efficient work;
• Client conflicts; and
• Attorney-Client Privilege and Confidentiality –
Team Access
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How to Pick Your Team of Collaborators
• Legal excellence – think about:
– context
– substantive law
– technical expertise
• Seek diversity of backgrounds and perspectives
– Consider resources who are not lawyers, such as technology,
communications and project management professionals
• Seek natural team players – no Lone Rangers
• Find those who are facile and adept at using technology, can
actively use technology tools
• Look for strong communicators and networkers – they tend to know
how to share information
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Collaboration planning
Alignment on
expectations, success
Communications
who? needs to learn what? when? from whom?
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Resources
Outside counsel paralegals
Outside counsel associates
Outside counsel partners
Outside counsel staff (non-billable)
Contract attorneys
Graduate business school students
Law school students
Paralegal program students
Retired lawyers (in-house, law firm)
Retired businesspersons
In-house teams from other depts.
Multiple law firms
Outsourcing to non-law firm vendors
Offshoring
Accounting firms
Consulting firms
Temporary staffing agencies
Investment bankers
Freelancers knowledgeable about your
industry
Public/investor relations consultants
Collaboration planning: Process
mapping
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Provide visual, step-by-step diagram of process or workflow
Understand existing process -- benchmark
Determine non-value add steps
Analyze opportunities, select improvements
Develop controls to ensure quality, consistency of process
improvement
• Create knowledge management opportunities
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Additional tools to consider
• Project management tools
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Scoping document/charter
Project plan/budget
Cadence meetings and communications strategies
RACI – Accountability
• Online collaboration tools
– Collaboration platforms e.g. SeyfarthLink
– Mobile technology applications
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Ongoing leadership and management
What can you do as the client to facilitate the collaboration among
competitors?
• Remove barriers and communicate strong client relationship with
all members of the team;
• Reward clear, candid, consistent communications with client and
among team members;
• Build trust and require trust between and among team members.
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Reward systems
• Fee structures—Well defined success fees
• Incentives and bonuses for collaboration and
efficiency
• Non-financial recognition
– Award for excellence across provider network
• References and cross-referrals
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13 Behaviors of High Trust
1. Talk Straight
2. Demonstrate Respect
3. Create Transparency
4. Right Wrongs
5. Show Loyalty
6. Deliver Results
7. Get Better
8. Confront Reality
9. Clarify Expectations
10. Practice Accountability
11. Listen First
12. Keep Commitments
13. Extend Trust
Source: Steven Covey, The Speed of Trust
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Questions?
• Lynn Kappelman:
lkappelman@seyfarth.com
►Seyfarth Shaw LLP (Boston)
• Katherine (Kate) Perrelli:
kperrelli@seyfarth.com
►Seyfarth Shaw LLP (Boston)
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Competitive Collaboration
How to Create Your Own Legal All-Star Team
October 2013
Lynn Kappelman, Seyfarth Shaw LLP
Katherine Perrelli, Seyfarth Shaw LLP
[client or consultant]
How Would You Design This Collaboration?
Team? Tools?
• You are the lead Intellectual Property attorney for a large
big box retailer and you have a portfolio of licensing
agreements which you need to negotiate and
manage. Your go to outside counsel firm who handles IP
litigation does not have the bandwidth to manage the
licensing aspect and they do not offer flat fees or project
management. What are some reasons you might want
different law firms to collaborate in representing
you? What are the challenges and how might you
facilitate this?
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How Would You Design This Collaboration?
Team? Tools?
• You are the head of employment litigation at a
regional retailer and you are concerned that some of
your employees are misclassified as exempt. Your
boutique law firm has worked with you on
employment litigation for years but does not have a
team who does wage and hour counseling and
audits. What are some reasons you might want
different law firms to collaborate in representing
you? What are the challenges and how might you
facilitate this?
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How Would You Design This Collaboration?
Team? Tools?
• You are the General Counsel of a global big box retailer and
you plan to open twenty new stores. Six of the new stores will
be in California where you have not had a presence yet, seven
of the new stores are in Germany and seven of them are in
Canada. You have a law firm which negotiates all of your
leases but they do not have a California presence or any
attorneys in Canada or Germany. What are some reasons you
might want different law firms to collaborate in representing
you? What are the challenges and how might you facilitate
this?
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