PORTLAND, OR–(Marketwired – August 29, 2016) – Exterro® Inc., the preferred provider of software specifically designed for in-house legal and IT teams at Global 2000 and AmLaw 200 organizations, today announced the 2016 Law Firm Benchmarking Report: Staying Competitive in Today’s Crowded Legal Market. The report shows that law firms are operating in an ever-changing legal business environment with an increased focused on shifting fee structures and improved productively as crucial elements to meeting heightened client expectations.
“The data in this report confirms what we and many others are observing in the market,” said Bill Piwonka, CMO of Exterro. “Clients are expecting more value at lower costs from their outside counsel than ever before, forcing firms to find ways to improve productivity and reduce costs. Implementing a formal, disciplined process-centric approach to managing legal projects is a tried and true method to achieving these goals, but in general, firms are just beginning to adopt these practices.”
According to the report, 79% of law firms surveyed are seeing an increase in client expectations. At the same time, firms are struggling to efficiently manage their projects — 73% of firms ranked completing tasks efficiently as their biggest legal project management challenge. In addition, when asked where survey respondents would place themselves on a legal project management maturity model, 51% of respondents ranked themselves as a level 1 or 2 on a 5-point scale, in which 1 is defined as ‘ad hoc’ and 5 correlates to ‘completely optimized’.
According to David Cohen, Practice Group Leader of Reed Smith’s global Records & E-Discovery (“RED”) Practice Group, “Most clients are no longer willing to pay without question hourly rates or standard vendor charges for e-discovery services, because they want to minimize costs and maximize the value of the investment. Advanced metrics programs — which monitor and report on performance at both an individual and macro levels, improve efficiency, identify cost-saving opportunities, help meet challenging case deadlines, and allow for pricing projects on an AFA basis — can reduce e-discovery costs by 50%-75% or more.”
The Law Firm Benchmarking Report is based on a survey completed by Exterro in August of 2016. The 112 participants answered questions about their current billing approach, how they are managing legal operations, and the future of legal operations.
About Exterro
Exterro®, Inc. is the preferred provider of software specifically designed for in-house legal and IT teams at Global 2000 and AmLaw 200 organizations. Founded with the simple vision that applying the concepts of process optimization and data science to the way companies respond to litigation would drive more successful outcomes at a lower cost, Exterro is once again positioned as a leader in Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant for E-Discovery Software. Built on an open architecture platform, Exterro’s e-discovery and information governance software integrates with existing IT, HR and legal systems to deliver complete visibility into all critical data required for managing information assets more efficiently.
Attachment Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/8/25/11G111886/Law_Firm_Benchmarking_Report-b29208ce8f54bbbc8aa269f25542f1e0.pdf
