PERSUIT partners with Fortune 10 company to disrupt legal spend and billing

Growing list of corporates includes Walmart, 3M, Microsoft embracing PERSUIT's Alternative Fee Arrangements Platform

MELBOURNE, Australia, Oct. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- PERSUIT, the creator of a groundbreaking AFA platform for legal services, today announced that it has agreed on a multi-year partnership with a Fortune 10 global energy leader.

The deal means that the Fortune 10 company will use PERSUIT's cloud-based platform to source all of its engagements with outside legal counsel. PERSUIT's platform will be rolled out to the company's entire global legal team and joins the likes of Walmart, Microsoft, 3M, Gilead and Wabash National in their selection of PERSUIT.

This latest agreement continues the assault on the status quo in legal purchasing, by addressing corporate legal departments' highest priority: controlling outside counsel costs.

Designed specifically for legal engagements, PERSUIT centralizes the entire RFP process, making it vastly easier to send, respond to, and compare proposals. The most dramatic efficiencies come via PERSUIT's reverse auction format, in which law firms submit transparent bids on legal projects.

The competitive bidding process typically last an hour, and delivers savings that dwarf efficiencies gained from e-billing and matter management software. PERSUIT also offers important advantages for responding firms, which can share the RFP internally and collaborate on the platform before responding.

"We could not be prouder to partner with the industry-leading in-house legal teams that have chosen PERSUIT," said Jim Delkousis, the founder and CEO of PERSUIT. "There has been a lot of talk in the legal industry for a long time about the move away from hourly billing to AFAs. We have focused on delivering a product which makes it easy for corporate legal departments to solicit certain competitive and easy-to-compare bids for their external legal work. The decision by our clients to choose PERSUIT is a strong validation of that effort."

"A number of our clients rely on RFPs to secure outside counsel, and they experience a lot of pain with the process -- inevitably involving a lot of email traffic, spreadsheets, and manual work," said Jim. "Our most recent success followed a client's global RFP process in search of an AFA platform before choosing PERSUIT, confirming our best of breed market position."

"We recently saw massive disparity among bids, where one RFP demonstrated an astounding 700 per cent differential in legal costs -- meaning one law firm bid seven times higher than its counterpart. In another case, there was close to a $5M 'spread' between the highest and lowest priced firm bids, with the winning bid more than $3.5M lower than the highest bidder," said Jim.

"PERSUIT has a clear vision: a single platform for in-house legal teams to manage all outside counsel engagements, globally," added Jim. "Our partnerships with our clients will only get stronger over time, as we scale AFAs and amass pricing data that will inform future outside counsel engagements."

About PERSUIT

PERSUIT is a technology company founded in 2016, established to deliver transparency and true market pricing in legal services for the benefit of Fortune 500 in-house legal teams. Learn more at www.persuit.com

Media contact:

Michael Zappone: Nominis Consulting, Phone: + 61 438 004 959, Email: [email protected]