APR 2022 | WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM Since then, demand for these types of services has seen a marked increase, with spend on ALSP now approaching $25 billion – an increase of more than 10 times over the last 20 years. This increase also reflects the effects of the financial crisis in 2008-2009, after which corporations began to bring much of their legal work in-house to reduce overall legal costs. In many cases, since they needed nontraditional legal services outside of what was offered by a law firm, they turned to specialist providers to fill any gaps for their legal in-house requirements. At the same time, law firms began to partner with legal consulting firms to tap into their alternative legal services to provide the best options for their corporate clients. You have described alternative legal services in the past as a ‘people’ business. Why is that? Legal consulting firms, including ALSPs, work with corporate in-house legal teams and law firms to identify areas where their specialised offerings and solutions can create efficiencies across various Could you give us a brief overview of what legal consulting solutions and alternative legal services are and how they are designed to assist law firms? Legal consulting practices, including Alternative Legal Services Providers (ALSPs), offer high-demand specialised legal solutions to law firms and corporate legal departments to help improve their productivity, lower their costs and mitigate risk for their clients. The rules pertaining to eDiscovery began to change throughout 2006, which increased the obligations of law firms and corporate clients to provide electronic data for litigation, really accelerated a need for outsourced service providers with legal and technology expertise to help with litigation and the voluminous amounts of electronic data. This data included emails, digitised paper documents, invoices, contracts, etc., that were first maintained on corporate servers and are now stored on cloud-based systems. MY LEGAL LIFE - CHAD VOLKERT What Do Alternative Legal Services Have to Offer? Adjacent to the work undertaken by law firms and legal departments, alternative legal and consulting services have seen incredible growth over the past decade. Chad Volkert, the Global Head of Legal Consulting at Protiviti, tells us more about the explosive growth of these legal sector services and how Protiviti is looking to meet an unprecedented demand. Demand for these types of services has seen a marked increase, with spend on ALSP now approaching $25 billion – an increase of more than 10 times over the last 20 years, according to our research. 21
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