Hi PERSUIT,
Here’s a stat that has really caused me to pause and think since it came across my desk last week:
The number of panel RFPs on PERSUIT has doubled year-over-year since 2020. 📈
That’s a pretty meaningful statistic to me. But not a surprising one.
A decade ago, when I was a managing partner at a major global firm, getting on panels was important — in fact, a big deal. And by all accounts, it still is.
I remember what it’s like from the perspective of the law firm.
Painful. And more often than not, the end result was disappointment.
Let me explain.
As a partner, I’d spend years developing relationships with key contacts within some of the biggest companies in the world. 🤝
Those relationships often led to an invitation for my firm to respond to a panel RFP to be selected for a position on the client panel.
When that happened, swathes of teams across the firm (including a big chunk of the business development and pitch teams) would spend days (sometimes weeks!) responding to the Panel RFP.
We’d:
- Pull together all the work we’d done for the client and work we’d done for similar clients
- Highlight our firm’s unique strengths across jurisdictions and practice areas
- Provide our hourly rates across dozens of lawyers
What an effort!!
(And we all know how precious those non-billable hours are to lawyers working in a law firm. 🕰️😳)
After all that work — time, energy, effort — we produced and submitted a telephone book-sized proposal.
(I pity the poor soul that had to read it — and dozens from other firms just like it.)
And when the news came in that my firm had won a place on the panel, PARTY TIME!! 🥳 Get ready everyone, the work is about to start flooding in!!
But inevitably, it didn’t.
It’d be crickets. 🦗
The implicit promise of making it onto a client panel was that law firms would be given opportunities to win more work.
That promise was often a broken one.
Why? Because the client would continue to distribute work in the same way as before the panel had been established. Or at least, as far as we could tell.
That lack of transparency was frustrating.
Here’s something that was true a decade ago when I was a partner. ⚖️
And it’s still true today:
A lack of transparency hurts relationships. 🤕
I have a vision of a more fair and transparent legal marketplace — one that works better for both firms and the GCs and CLOs that hire them.
One that lives up to the implicit promise that comes with making it onto a client panel.
And I’m not the only one.
Today, GCs and CLOs are asking their teams to use panels in a way that is more fair, transparent, and strategic.
They know that this lack of transparency is detrimental to everyone.
But increasing transparency is — I believe — better for both sides of the relationship. 🤝
Panels give in-house teams the law firm resources they can turn to whenever needed.
And for firms, winning a spot on a panel means an opportunity to win more client work and better relationships with that client.
To better facilitate this process, we’re just about to release a new tool within PERSUIT called Panel Management.
(If you’re a PERSUIT user, you’ll hear a lot more about this very soon!)
I hope that it will help you create an even better relationship between your team and the firms you work with.
And I hope the process gives firms more transparency into why they were (or were not) selected for your panel.
No one deserves to hear crickets after putting hours or weeks of time into a proposal — not on either side of the relationship.
What has your experience been with panels?
Does your in-house team operate with appropriate transparency when choosing which firm to engage for a matter? Or for your panel?
Click reply to this email and let me know!
Cheers,
-Jim
