Extract from Phillip Bantz’s article “The Rise of In-House Legal Ops Has Turbo Boosted ALSPs’ Growth”
A few years ago, legal operations leader Mike Russell was working at Ingersoll Rand Inc., when the global manufacturing company faced the challenge of trying to coordinate and oversee about 30 law firms scattered across multiple states.
The company could have gone the traditional route and hired national coordinating and discovery counsel. Instead, the legal department turned to an alternative legal services provider to handle the job. The ALSP brought boots on the ground to visit the company’s warehouses, and sort through paper files as part of the discovery process.
“We needed a way to coordinate all the discovery-related activity,” Russell said. “Basically, it was a way to be sure, as an organization, that we were saying the same thing in every court and every jurisdiction in responding to discovery so there wouldn’t be any mismatch. [Otherwise] the plaintiffs could come back and say, ‘You said this in New York so you can’t say this in California.’”
