Elevate Partners with Lex Mundi for Consulting Role

Everyone’s favourite ‘law company’, Elevate, has struck an advisory deal with one of the world’s leading law firm networks, Lex Mundi.

Helena Samaha, President & CEO of Lex Mundi, said: ‘Elevate possesses outstanding expertise, a deep understanding of legal technology, and a strong track record of providing sound strategic advice to both in-house as well as firm practice teams. Our selection of Elevate in this consultative role will unquestionably advance our enhancement of the Lex Mundi value proposition for our members and, ultimately, their clients.’

By coincidence Artificial Lawyer had just this very week been chatting to Lex Mundi’s top management about doing just such a link-up with a process focused group. Synchronicity is a funny old thing. Although, in that conversation the focus was on partnerships that would primarily provide large-scale process capability, rather than consulting and legal ops advice – which is what this deal is all about.

It’s an interesting one because people (er…well, some people) tend to think of Elevate as a primarily process focused business, handling the jobs that law firms cannot easily do. But, they’ve been steadily building their consulting and legal ops advisory practice, including tech consulting, bringing in people such as Brian Kuhn from IBM.

(Although, they also lost three senior people in the consulting group, including Jack Diggle, to Deloitte a week ago….so maybe there will be some more hires in the works soon?)

Elevate will collaborate with the Lex Mundi organisation (i.e. its employed group of HQ staff that run the network) and its member law firms on an international basis, ‘drawing on its deep consulting experience with both law firms and corporate legal teams’.

Lex Mundi is one of the better known such referral groups and has over 150 member firms around the world, including the likes of MoFo and Baker Botts.

Liam Brown, Elevate Chairman and CEO, added: ‘Because Elevate works with law departments and law firms, we have a deep understanding of both the rapidly emerging needs of in-house counsel and also of law firm strategies to meet those new needs, that really work.

‘We help firms improve technology, people, and processes, to satisfy their clients’ growing desire for new delivery models and innovative approaches.’