Law Firms

While Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG) helps top law firms in many ways (business development, deal support, firm strategy, and more), the lynchpin of our service to law firms is our ability to deliver high quality, highly niche experts for litigation consulting and expert witness services.

Current clients:

Gerson Lehrman Group only began serving law firms in 2007, but has already built deep relationships with several of the world's top-20 litigation defense firms (as measured by per-partner profitability).

How GLG helps:

Law firms use GLG's platform in four key ways: litigation support; deal support; pitch support; and firm strategy and management.

Litigation Support - Law firms turn to GLG when traditional litigation consultants are not adequate. This can occur when the case requires experts who are credible but have never previously testified; when the matter turns on a highly obscure technology; or when specialized business practices are at issue. In these situations, law firms benefit from the GLG platform which provides a high volume of diverse consulting opportunities to a vast and extremely diverse global network. GLG can rapidly mine this network to find the relevant and appropriate experts.
Deal Support GLG's service becomes valuable when counterparties in radically different industries negotiate against each other for the first time. In these situations, counsel can make mistakes due to a lack of in-depth knowledge of their counterparties' technology, economics, and culture. GLG provides cost-effective and highly specialized experts to level the playing field.
Pitch Support - Law firms use GLG to gain a decisive edge in asking for their clients' business. This is particularly true for "beauty contests" where top law firms are competing against similarly well-positioned firms. Law firms use GLG to conduct industry-specific interviews while preparing for pitches, writing proposals, and developing marketing initiatives.
Firm Strategy and Management - Busy attorneys can use GLG's network to commission fast-turnaround assessments on topics ranging from best practices to the evolving legal environment in a potential new office location.

Unique advantages:

Gerson Lehrman Group helps attorneys find suitable experts; appropriately engage experts through a variety of methods and manage the use and ongoing relationship with experts for the benefit of their entire firm.

Find:

GLG's organization of 250+ Research Professionals use proprietary tools to identify, contact and evangelize the benefits of the GLG Councils to more than two million specialized experts.
Once enrolled in the GLG Councils, experts are categorized within unique taxonomies, with dynamic questionnaires canvassing their experience with and knowledge of niche subjects. This continuous profiling helps GLG to provide clients with appropriate experts, even on short notice.
GLG assesses Council Member quality through a proprietary GLG Council Rank^SM algorithm. By enabling over ten thousand consulting transactions each month, GLG has rich data on the demonstrated value of experts.

Engage:

Litigators can use GLG's platform to manage payments by their clients directly to their litigation consultants.
Deal attorneys, firm management, and attorneys preparing for pitches use GLG's contract and payment platform to commission telephone consultations and fast-turnaround written reports.

Manage:

GLG provides easy-to-use Web-based software for attorneys to rate, tag, share, and search the expert contacts made during ongoing client service, business development, and knowledge development. This tool eliminates the need to update and share addresses and contact information, while enabling the firms to build their lists of contacts as enterprise-wide assets.
Accounting staff seeking to allocate research costs to specific individuals, ideas, and practices use the GLG systems to track usage and manage spending.