Kathryn DeBord and Chris Emerson of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner Bryan Cave Launches New Consultancy Division for In-House Teams
Named Cantilever, a new division of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner is a combination of two of the firm's old in-house brands and will provide consulting services for contract systems, technology, legal operations and litigation management along with document and decision-making automation applications.
November 13, 2018 at 04:10 PM
3 minute read
The original version of this story was published on Corporate Counsel
Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner has tapped two of the firm's innovation leaders, Chris Emerson and Kathryn DeBord, to head a new global legal operations consultancy division for corporate legal departments.
Dubbed Cantilever, the new division is a mash-up of Bryan Cave's BCXponent and Streamline divisions and also brings together other teams within the firm that focus on providing services to in-house clients, according to a news release.
DeBord and Emerson are co-founders of Cantilever and also serve as the firm's global chief innovation officer and chief of legal operations solutions, respectively. They are now co-leading a team of 20 engineers, data scientists and tech gurus who aim to help legal departments improve their operations.
“We have been doing legal operations work since before it was called legal operations,” DeBord, who is based in Denver, said in an interview. “The point of Cantilever is to help law departments function better, operationalize legal advice within their own departments, and also act as partners and be a strategic adviser back to the business.”
Cantilever has about a dozen clients at the moment, according to DeBord. The division boasts a proprietary software platform called CrossLite, which the firm describes as a “sophisticated data management and analytics tool.” Its members will offer consulting services for contract systems, technology, legal operations and litigation management along with document and decision-making automation solutions.
DeBord joined Bryan Cave as a partner in 2012 and was appointed chief innovation officer about three years later, according to her LinkedIn profile. She previously worked as an intelligence analyst for the CIA and was an associate at Kirkland & Ellis and a partner at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.
She'd served as co-leader of BCXponent alongside Emerson, who is in St. Louis and has been with Bryan Cave for more than two decades. He joined the firm in 1997 as a user support specialist and rose through the ranks to his current role.
Emerson said in a prepared statement that Cantilever stands out because of the wide range of skills that its team offers to in-house clients: “As well as consultancy and strategic advice, we can provide highly practical solutions and tools that solve the issues clients face.”
“We stitch together these solutions with the BCLP legal teams' expertise to provide something that clients tell us others aren't able to deliver,” he added.
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