As an increasing number of law firms are trotting out their own alternative legal service providers, two have already caught on with corporate legal departments.

A new report from the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, or CLOC, revealed that nearly half of the 213 respondents had used ALSPs in 2018. The 17 outfits they named as favorites included subsidiaries of Eversheds Sutherland and Fenwick & West.

Eversheds Consulting and FLEX by Fenwick joined names like Axiom, Elevate and Integreon, as well as Big Four firms Deloitte, EY and PwC, as 34% of respondents reported making increasing use of ALSPs in the last year.

Both Eversheds Consulting and FLEX are longstanding players in the ALSP arena, even if the former technically ceased to exist last month. Eversheds Sutherland announced in June that it would be merging its advisory unit, officially titled ES Consulting, with its corporate secretarial and volume insolvency teams into one unit, named Konexo. The firm said that while the current units, combined, bring in £40 million, or about $50.77 million, of annual revenue, it sought to boost that number to nearly $127 million.

Fenwick's FLEX dates back to 2010, and matches companies with temporary in-house attorneys, promising them the ability to work for a diverse portfolio of tech companies.

Other firms are still extending their own flexible lawyer services; in one example, Pinsent Masons brought its staffing subsidiary Vario to Hong Kong in April.

But the trend is shifting toward subsidiaries that offer corporate law departments and other customers technological solutions. Take Greenberg Traurig, which in June unveiled Recurve, a platform aimed at connecting law firms and in-house attorneys with providers of legal tech services, nimble staffing and real estate experts, artificial intelligence purveyors, and more.

Other similar examples include Dentons' legal technology startup NextLaw Labs, unveiled in 2015, and Reed Smith's GravityStack, launched last year.

These law firms' commitment to finding alternate ways to offer services to clients matches up with another finding from the CLOC report, addressing what innovations law departments are seeking from their firms.

The top four results, in order, were more creative and alternative fee arrangements, better project management, more internal use of technology, and client-facing digital services with self-service access to advice and solutions.

At least for some firms, it seems, the message is getting across.

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