Steve Harmon, general counsel of Elevate Services.

As founder and executive chairman of Los Angeles-based legal services and technology company Elevate Services Inc., Liam Brown is in the business of helping legal departments leverage tech to streamline transactions and reduce costs.

Yet when Brown was faced with ballooning invoices from outside counsel and a high-pressure 30-day deadline to close Elevate's acquisition of Yerra Solutions earlier this year, his knee-jerk reaction was to turn back to outside counsel for help.

“When I was under the gun, I found myself leaning toward saying, 'Let's suck this up and use this [outside firm] again,'” Brown said.

But Elevate's new general counsel, Steve Harmon, who joined the company in late 2018 while Elevate was in the midst of acquiring several rival and related businesses, convinced Brown to look inward. And in doing so he helped Elevate slash outside legal costs in the Yerra acquisition from an estimated $400,000 to $60,000, according to Brown and Harmon.

“This is the classic example of eating my own dog food. You test your own products on yourself,” Harmon said. “Coming from Cisco, where we've taken this approach internally, I brought those best practices to Elevate.”

Harmon, who also serves as vice president and deputy general counsel of legal at Cisco Systems Inc., where he's worked since 2000, had relied on Elevate's software to streamline deals and cut costs for Cisco. And now Harmon found himself giving Brown a nudge to do the same.

Liam Brown, founder and executive chairman of Elevate.

Brown was receptive, in part, because he had been frustrated with outside counsel expenses that routinely exceeded his budget, saying, for instance, that he was getting invoices that were supposed to be fixed at $250,000 but had snowballed to $400,000.

“It makes me look like I'm not able to manage a budget,” Brown said. “The last thing I need is to look stupid.”

He added he'd brought his concerns to a partner at one of the outside firms in question, but the partner was primarily interested in whether Brown was satisfied with the legal work—not about going over budget.

“The legal work was great,” Brown said, adding the partner had missed his point. “They [outside counsel] don't work in a systemized way so they don't keep control of their costs.”

And when Harmon approached Brown and questioned why Elevate kept turning to outside counsel for M&A deals instead of unbundling the legal work using Elevate software, that was enough to convince Brown to try something different.

“The fact that he [Harmon] had the confidence to say this is what we should do really made the difference,” Brown said.

By using software for project management, due diligence and Elevate's staffing service for hiring lawyers and legal professionals on an as-needed basis to handle, for instance, document review and other less complex tasks, the company closed the Yerra acquisition on time and under budget, according to Harmon and Brown.

“M&A is a very good application for this [hiring service] in that most organizations can't afford to keep a large group of legal professionals on staff just because they happen to do a M&A deal,” Harmon said.

“Our example here should provide confidence to people about the role that law companies play,” he added. “Whether customers use Elevate or one of the other law companies out there or decides to build this in-house, it's a strategic decision they'll have to make.”

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