How Lex Mundi's Platform Won Gold For Best Applied Technology

Lex Mundi is a leading network of independent law firms delivering consistent, high-quality advice that's critical to solving complex cross-border challenges. Their carefully vetted and continuously reviewed, top-tier ember firms uphold the highest-level service standards while offering preferred access to 22,000+ lawyers worldwide in 125+ countries.

Supported by client-focused methods, joint learning and training, innovative technologies, and the Lex Mundi team of 30, member firms collaborate across borders and industries to deliver multi-jurisdictional solutions for their clients. Lex Mundi member firms are located in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin and South America and North America.

Summary?

Lex Mundi Equisphere is a global client service platform designed to offer clients an attractive alternative when outsourcing their complex, multi-jurisdictional legal needs – providing consistent quality, market knowledge, peerless coverage and convenience. ?

Equisphere allows clients to interface with Lex Mundi as a single entity, bespoke to their needs. Through innovative use of a fairly standard technology – in this case, HighQ Collaborate and associated project management software - the team at Lex Mundi produced a new, compelling solution to a well-established market.

They followed the idea of creating a platform that would enable a legal network to act as a single entity for the client; this would have all the convenience of a single firm but with peerless coverage, market knowledge and consistent quality. What would it look like? Launched in June 2020, Equisphere answers that question.?

Background?

When Lex Mundi talked to their clients, they had remarkably similar concerns about the service they receive from the traditional legal suppliers:

Consistency of quality – a firm not being the same in its satellite offices as in its headquarters

Coverage – there were gaps, and the solutions to these were not satisfactory

Cost – recognition that the costs were likely to be high and that they were paying for the name

Control – a lack of transparency?

The first three areas match the traditional areas of strength and differentiation for Lex Mundi.

Consistency of quality

Founded as the first of the legal networks in 1989, Lex Mundi became the choice of many top independent law firms. Having set that standard, the network created a review process to maintain it. If standards slip in a member firm, the network will pick that up in the review process and likely ask that firm to leave the network.?

The resulting consistency of quality is Lex Mundi's distinguishing factor, widely recognized and objectively measured by Chambers in its 2021 Weighted Comparison. Members must meet standards on response times, free advice requirements, cybersecurity, sophistication in IT usage, client feedback and more, and share core values.

Together, these produce a consistent, seamless client experience across member firms. Moreover, the quality and expertise are deployed on the ground in the jurisdictions - where the client is - not centralized in a distant HQ like London or New York.

Coverage

Lex Mundi's scale surpasses any individual law firm and almost every network, with 22,000 lawyers in 181 jurisdictions, operating through 700 offices in over 125 countries. Combined, the network generates $11.2Bn p.a.

Consequently, Lex Mundi is better placed to match the footprint of a client than any international law firm. And it can reassure clients that the lawyers they are using are among the very best in their jurisdictions, routinely working on deals as complex and high value as their own.?

Cost

Their membership consisting of the top local independent firms translates to providing excellent value. They don’t pass on the overheads of a London or New York headquarters. Equisphere takes these existing Lex Mundi differentiators and, through the use of readily available collaborative technology and software, delivers them in a completely new way by adding:

• Consistent, documented and standardized processes and procedures across multi-jurisdictional teams with training
• Professional account/project management
• A collaborative technology platform which provides complete transparency and therefore addresses that fourth requirement (a sense of control for the client)
• Underlying processes and procedures sit alongside professional account management, project management and dashboard control to provide full transparency and a new, convenient, efficient and compelling model of legal service delivery.

In short, Equisphere offers clients a completely new ability – to create their ideal global legal team.

Specific goals?

The team's goals were to:

1) Create an innovative, efficient and compelling alternative to the traditional international legal firm model for outsourced legal work.

2) Achieve an initial 12 client instructions in the first year (which they considered ambitious, given the fact they were launching in the worst phase of the pandemic and the in-house legal community is notoriously conservative and risk-averse). These instructions generate a new flow of high-quality and high-margin work for the Lex Mundi member firms.

3) Establish Equisphere as a viable new direction for the Lex Mundi network.

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In our latest IBXA? report, you can study Lex Mundi's initiative more in-depth (their implementation process, stakeholder engagement, innovation and creativity - and achieved results). Download the free ebook here: https://bit.ly/3CC1ni8

?This report also contains two more?gold-winning case studies, and you can learn about:

• Socialize's 'Crunch it' campaign, through which they turned the millennial-loved salted crisp snack, Bugles, from a boomer brand to a zoomer brand.
• Noor takaful's journey to becoming the leading takaful (a type of insurance system devised to comply with the sharia laws) provider in the country and becoming a great place to work.

Learn from the leaders of business excellence, and get inspired to join IBXA '23 and present your results!