It's Not Just About the Money

For Thomas Sager, senior vice president and general counsel at E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, mounting mass tort lawsuits in the early 1990s forced a reexamination of the way his company worked with outside counsel. The DuPont Legal Model that Sager unveiled in 1992 brought business discipline into the practice of law, calling for greater cooperation between DuPont and its outside lawyers. It aimed to cut costs by using litigation budgets and alternative fee arrangements that paid law firms for meeting a series of performance metrics. The new model also promoted diversity by hiring firms that actively recruited women and minorities. Sager's use of performance metrics in evaluating firms not only demonstrated that law departments could provide value to a company, but changed the way firms and companies measured success, says Susan Hackett, chief executive officer of consulting firm Legal Executive Leadership. "Tom was out in front way before anyone else," she says. "Law firms are following his lead now and focusing on the business of law." The Financial Post estimated that the model had saved DuPont more than $175 million as of 2010.

When Keith Wetmore began his career in 1982 as an associate in the San Francisco office of Morrison & Foerster, it was a scary time to be an openly gay male. The AIDS crisis was just beginning. Most gay and lesbian lawyers remained in the closet at their jobs. Wetmore says that although the firm was generally accepting of his homosexuality, the interviewing partner still advised him to keep quiet about it. The advice didn't take. Wetmore was the first openly gay partner to rise from the associate ranks at MoFo. Then, in 2000, when he was elected MoFo's chair, he became the first openly gay head of a major law firm. Throughout his career, Wetmore has led initiatives that helped set new standards for gay rights in the law firm workplace. In the 1990s, for instance, MoFo became one of the first law firms to expand its benefits coverage to include same-sex partners; more recently, in 2010, it announced that it would offer health care tax offsets to employees and attorneys in same-sex domestic partnerships, one of the first firms to do so.