Keesal Young

Legal operations is all the noise among many major corporate legal departments, so it may come as no surprise that law firms are lining up to launch their own technology offerings to meet this emerging class of corporate clients. The latest to take a stab is Keesal Young & Logan, which has launched its Propulsion Labs, an offering geared toward giving corporate legal departments a bump in building out their own tech arsenals.

At its core, the program is an attempt to assist clients in both designing and implementing compliance and standardization tools and processes across the spectrum of legal work. In Keesal Young CIO Justin Hectus' telling, offerings will include legal process automation and improvement, risk assessment, data flow mapping, data control support, and advisory and “transforming” information management processes.

Hectus also told Legaltech News about the lab's plan to address client woes over using intranet portals. “Rather than coming to an intra or internal portal and having a menu of operations, we're flipping that for users to express problems,” he noted. Users “feel stymied by an endless number of solutions, but come to portal and think, 'I just want to do X,' so they call a person. We want to reduce that and have it all automated.”

Keesal Young's tech pursuit was launched via a partnership with legal technology company Mitratech, which specializes in matter management, compliance and e-billing. Hectus said that before the partnership, the firm was a customer of ThinkSmart, a service for operating legal operations tasks that was acquired by Mitratech earlier this year. Specifically, Propulsion Labs' services operate heavily on ThinkSmart's automation platform, and the company and the firm are promoting the effort under the banner of a “TAP Workflow Automation Partnership.”

For Mitratech's part, senior vice president of product management Chris Kraft told Legaltech News the company will provide feedback for product direction. He added ThinkSmart had maintained a “pretty loose” working relationship with Keesal Young in service offerings over the past year, and that collaborating “in a formal way” means a different pricing model, packaging approach and perspectives from different parties at the law firm, vendor and corporate legal levels.

At present, the service is being opened up to four of Keesal Young's existing clients, though Hectus nor the release specified those clients.