Leftfoot - Legal Business Development

Move Beyond Being Risk-Averse As part of our Executing Change series, focusing on in-house legal award winners and the changes they’ve implemented within their departments, we welcome back Alan Bryan, Wal-Mart’s Senior Associate General Counsel.  Alan was also a guest on LeftFoot Episode 68. Walmart had an opportunity to change; to centralize, to change firm engagement, and increase legal dollar spend value through leverage – and it worked.  Walmart saw immediate value through the implementation of uniform engagement letters with uniform terms and rates; eliminating tens of thousands of agreements including agreements with different terms and rates with the same firm. Uniform engagement letters set the stage for what was next.  In a legal department where the majority of matters are litigation; Walmart turned to data; matter-by-matter RFPs and reverse auctions to create fixed fee and phased fee proposals.  Dashboards and access to data remain critical parts of the program today, a process that began w