Hi, it's Jim Delkousis, and welcome to The PERSUIT, a weekly newsletter dedicated to helping enterprise legal leaders advance in the new marketplace for legal. If you're not already a subscriber, you can click here to join 4,700+ senior legal executives who get The PERSUIT delivered directly to their inbox.
Last week in New York, we hosted PERSUIT Exchange | Financial Services, a half-day gathering of senior legal leaders from law firms and in-house teams across the financial sector.
I knew our events team would crush it (and they did!), but I wasn’t fully prepared for how powerful it would be to have clients and firms together in the same room.
No screens. No Zoom boxes. Just real conversations about how this industry is changing and how we navigate that change together. We covered a lot of ground, but four themes stuck with me:
1. “Tell me how you're using AI, and how I’m going to see that value.” Chatham House rules prevent me from revealing who said the above quote, but it’s a perfect distillation of the state of AI in legal.
AI and data were everywhere in the conversation, but not just in the buzzwordy sense. There was a clear-eyed recognition that legal, especially in contracts, sits on mountains of data. But in-house data is unmatched by the sheer breadth of data that firms have access to.
That asymmetry matters — especially as firms build proprietary AI tools, raising important questions:
How is client data being used to train these models?
How is time saved being passed back to the client?
If every firm builds its own AI tool, how much time must GCs spend vetting each one?
These aren’t academic concerns, they are very real. And while they can’t be solved in an afternoon, surfacing them openly was a critical step forward.
2. RFPs: Not a four-letter word When asked if RFPs erode relationships, answers were all over the map, from yes to no to “sometimes they get in the way.”
However, RFPs were recognized to be an “at-bat” and provide firms with access to opportunities they otherwise might have missed.
Regardless of your RFP stance, more than one speaker emphasized how they are an opportunity for both sides to communicate. For clients, it’s a chance to deliver as much information as possible: list all your assumptions, be clear about phases. For firms, it’s a chance to ask questions and put real thought into their proposals to come up with a price that’s fair and defensible.
3. Your firm peers? That’s for clients to decide This was my favorite insight of the day. During the course of the law firm panel discussion, there was debate about the value of allowing law firms to see which firms they were competing with on an RFP.
The suggestion was that if the law firms knew they were competing against firms that they regarded as their ‘peers’, then that would somehow validate (or not) the pricing they had put forward. So, a top-tier firm could justify a higher price than a mid-tier firm. Someone from the audience challenged the premise.
“It’s not who you [the law firm] think your firm peers are, but who we [the client] think your law firm peers are.”
This was, for me, a light bulb moment.
4. Value. Value. Value. Whether in-house or at a firm, everyone in the room felt the same pressure: deliver value. Rates are climbing. Budgets are tightening. The question isn’t just how much does this cost? — it’s is this worth it?
Which brings us back to where we started. Honest and open conversations like these are the first step toward real alignment.
Ultimately, that’s what PERSUIT Exchange is all about. And if you weren’t in the room this time, I hope to see you at the next one.
