This week I’m at one of my favorite conferences. It’s put on by the American Association of Law Librarians (AALL). The theme for 2025 is “Be Bold” and that sometimes means making better use of data to make good decisions. This year the conference is in Portland, Oregon and yes, I’ve already hit the Stumphouse, Powells and Deschutes. (Pics posted on Facebook).

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Last night the Conference kicked off with the typical first night exhibit hall reception. As is my custom, I wandered the hall to see what looked new or different than what I have seen before. I visited with several vendors but had an interesting chat with Phil Flora, VP of Sales at Surepoint which owns a legal tech vendor called Leopard Solutions. Flora is a jovial, but earnest sales rep that genuinely makes you immediately like him. Leopard maintains a data base of legally related information including such things as market trends, market research, legal job data, and attorney employment information. 

Flora told me about a relatively new Leopard platform called Leopard Prowess. According to the Leopard marketing material, Prowess is designed to help in house counsel in the selection and performance assessment of outside counsel. The data base consists of over 5,800 law firms and 405,000 attorneys. There are also xxx in house lawyer participating and greater expansion is planned.

Armed with this kind of information, in house counsel could make better selection decisions by matching the kind of matter with lawyers that had experience in the field. Ok, that’s not that new. But what the platform also does in provide an evaluation rating. So, an in-house counsel could see what their peers really think about a lawyer’s performance and how good they are perceived to be. The rankings are from one to five in several key categories:

  • Risk management
  • Expertise and knowledge
  • Financial management
  • Efficiency
  • Communication and responsiveness
  • Timeliness
  • Client satisfaction.

Basically, the rankings give you a snapshot of what other in-house counsel who have used a firm think about its performance, all anonymously, of course.

The tool also shows any connection someone in the firm has had with the business, years of #experience, specialty, diversity statistics and size of a firm and the like. The platform enables you to determine the percentage of firms and lawyers in a firm that match the filters that in house counsel inputs.

What keeps them honest?

Why did this resonate with me? After all, I was never served as an in-house counsel. But I quite often was tasked with selecting local counsel to work with me on cases. And in pre data analytics days, that often proved difficult. There was no way to verify what the candidates would tell you about their experience and more importantly, their relationship with a judge (perhaps most critically).

Not to stereotype, but all too often I found that what they told you in the selection process didn’t always hold true in practice. The most important criteria, local knowledge, was hard to evaluate without data. How do you ensure you are getting what you think you are? What keeps them honest?

The result was either a reduction in quality to the client, higher costs, sometimes disruption when a local counsel would, frankly, try to upstage and ultimately the replacement of local counsel mid case with someone else. Not an ideal situation.

And I can imagine when it comes to selecting the primary counsel in a matter it’s even more difficult. When a local counsel goes bad, I can deal with it. When the primary counsel fails, an in house who is paid for results not on time has to deal with it. On top of this, selections without data means relying on word of mouth or gut instinct which is never good. Compound this over multiple matters and you have a big headache for in house counsel. As I have said before, the best tech relieves headaches.

Perish for Lack of Knowledge?

It’s been said all too often we perish for lack of knowledge. Leopard’s Prowess platform is designed to empower in house counsel with that kind of knowledge. Good tool, assuming it performs as represented of course. To work, though, the ratings must be based on performance, which in law is always difficult since there is often not a right answer or way to do things. It also depends on the information inputted by law firms is accurate which may still be problematic.

But the platform is a step in the right direction.