ACC Value Challenge

WMACCA Roundtable Discussion (see videos right)

In support of the Association of Corporate Counsel's Value Challenge initiative to realign the legal business model, Womble Carlyle recently hosted a Roundtable discussion with leadership from the Washington Metropolitan Area Corporate Counsel Association (WMACCA) to discuss how to convert the clearly defined challenges into action items for success. The groups addressed the Business Model Misalignment, Personal Misalignment and Commercial Misalignment concerns and ultimately asked, how do we stop talking and start working together for each other?

The ACC Value Challenge

Given today's rapidly evolving economy, the complexity of the law today and a setting where legal issues can make or break a company, it makes sense for companies and their legal counsel to examine fresh, mutually beneficial, relationships.

Womble Carlyle is proud to support the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Value Challenge. According to the ACC, this campaign has several goals, but primary among them is to improve working relationships between companies and their legal counsel and to help ensure that both parties clearly understand the value of working together. The ACC believes traditional law firm practices and attorney training often can be better aligned with the expectations and needs of corporate clients.

In many instances, the traditional approach, in which outside law firms bill corporate clients by the hour for services provided, continues to work just fine. But in other cases, a company may prefer a different arrangement. For example, perhaps they want greater cost certainty on the front end of a project, rather than receiving a bill after the work is completed.

Teaming with its clients, Womble Carlyle has long been a pioneer in providing innovative billing solutions. Building on a 135-year tradition of experience and experience in client service, the firm now is working alongside the ACC during its Value Challenge campaign.

According to the ACC, the Value Challenge initiative seeks to:

• Create a national dialog about the need to discuss the relationship between value and cost.
• Identify core groups of leaders in the in-house and outside firm communities to drive this discussion.
• Offer tool kits for use by in-house counsel and outside firms focusing on cutting-edge practices and models for managing value.
• Nourish the development of an in-house client community that gives law firms reasonable comfort that their efforts to implement change will be supported and rewarded.
• Encourage law firms to focus on retention of talent valued by clients.
• Develop lawyers as counselors, advocates and professional partners.

The Value Challenge is just the latest in a long line of ACC efforts that Womble Carlyle strongly supports. For example, the firm is the national sponsor of the ACC's New to In-House Committee, and is an active supporter of every ACC chapter within Womble Carlyle’s geography.

The Association of Corporate Counsel serves the needs of attorneys who practice in the legal departments of corporations and private sector organizations worldwide. The ACC has nearly 24,000 members in 81 countries, employed by more than 10,000 organizations.

Commitment to Value: Custom Client Services Solution (C²S²)

Buyers of legal services demand value for their legal spend, and now, with Custom Client Service Solutions (C²S²) Womble Carlyle is able to deliver value as never before.

C²S² is Womble Carlyle’s proprietary customized service delivery program premised on our sensitivity to the unique needs and wants of each legal-services buyer.

The objective of C²S² is to develop for our clients a customized service delivery program hallmarked by defined client relationship management attributes and coupled with clearly defined, often alternative, fee proposals based on sub-units of work. The concept is to not only provide our clients with superior legal service that is specifically shaped to their unique success metrics and definitions of "value," but also to offer our clients fee structures that are predictable and designed to work within their budgeting processes and needs.

Among the components of C²S² are:

• Staffing combinations that permit optimum service delivery and cost based on client needs and wants. In addition to Womble Carlyle’s nearly 600 "traditional" lawyer ranks including partners, associates and paralegals, we also are able to form teams utilizing contract attorneys, non-lawyer professional staff, word processors and document specialists, and outsourced professionals.
• Proprietary technology that allows us to automate tasks formerly requiring hands-on attention. Our technology also facilitates team communication, enhances project management, efficiently shares work with client staff, and further drives out costs from legal service delivery.
• Pricing alternatives that feature defined management commitments for each client relationship, coupled with bracketed fee proposals for our legal services based on the various sub-units of work involved in the matters for which our clients require our assistance.
• Utilization of an Engagement Efficiency Model that allows us to team with our clients to design -- on the spot and to their specifications -- staffing alternatives that allow clients to, themselves, participate in the selection of team member levels as well as details about the actual work units to be undertaken.
  Womble Carlyle’s proprietary C²S² is based on our extensive primary research into the needs and wants of legal-services buyers, including but not limited to those in the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), an organization with which we are teaming to define and deliver value for all buyers of legal services.

As a law firm long known for innovation and as a significant sponsor of the ACC, Womble Carlyle is one of the private law firms and other organizations supporting the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Value Challenge project, which is intended to create law firm business models better aligned with what corporate clients want – value-driven, high-quality legal services that deliver performance for a reasonable cost and develop lawyers as both savvy counselors and efficient business partners.

We look forward to working with you to thoroughly understand your definitions of legal service value, and to team with you to develop your own custom client service solution.