The founders of Valorem Law Group, Patrick Lamb and Nicole Auerbach, created ElevateNext. Lamb, also a
2009 ABA Journal Legal Rebel, says he and Auerbach created the company this year to find a way to provide a more comprehensive solution to clients.
“We need to find a way to stop just being lawyers and be able to provide a different type of solutions to clients,” Lamb says. “Lawyers tend to see problems and say, ‘Here’s a legal solution,’ and sometimes that’s the right solution. But sometimes that might not be the right solution. Clients don’t put things into boxes saying, ‘This is legal, and this is something else.’ They just have a problem, and they want their problem solved.
“So we needed a broader platform, a broader range of skill sets that we can bring to address to clients’ problems. Our alignment with Elevate services introduced us to the broad range of capabilities. We’ll be able to present to the clients a seamless array of services.”
Lamb, a 61-year-old Detroit native, says his professional relationship with Carr goes back many years. They began working together when Lamb was a partner at Butler Rubin Saltarelli & Boyd in Chicago and Carr was general counsel at FMC Technologies. When Lamb created Valorem, he handled a lot of litigation work for FMC Technologies. When Carr retired, he worked with Lamb consulting at Valorem before he joined Univar.
“Pat and I both think similarly; he and I share the same vision. The vision is essentially legal process optimized, problems prevented. It was natural to start working with him at Univar as well,” Carr says.
Carr has given Lamb a goal of reducing Univar’s legal spend by 50 percent. Lamb says this will mean redesigning the way services are thought of and rethinking priorities.
“We are going to have to eliminate a lot of demand for law department retention. So that means avoiding problems,” Lamb says. “We’re working on ways to reduce and help avoid problems from rising. That’s the challenge he’s presented, and I think it’s exactly the right thing to look at.
“It’s what the future is, because the current system is not sustainable. The demand and need for services can’t continue to grow. I think it’s a visionary approach, and it’s likely where the future leads us.”
Carr says the vision is like a mass customization: Companies that share the same core set of legal issues can be handled with the application of the same processes.
“It’s taking everything that an in-house legal department does and breaking it down to a series of processes that can be repeated, and they don’t have to be performed by lawyers,” Carr says. “They need to be overseen by lawyers, the lawyers need to own and define the processes and define what the controlling inputs are, but the actual operation of those processes is done by other people.”
In Carr’s view, the law department of the future is simply an executive function that is performing as an important part of an executive team. It provides value to the company by maintaining the ethical compass and helping the company succeed in its business objectives while mitigating risk—the focus is on preventing problems.
“In what we’re trying to build here between ElevateNext and Univar, we’re trying to get proof that you can ‘proccessify’ the delivery of legal services, and that you can drastically reduce the cost of them, providing better values to the companies,” Carr says.
“If the concept works, then this can be adopted by any company. ElevateNext will have it to offer to others,” he says. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll go back and race cars.”
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