ACC Value Challenge Resource Library

Microsoft’s Procurement & Contracting (P&C) group, a small in-house legal team supporting procurement contracts globally across Microsoft, was producing excellent results, but Lucy Bassli, assistant general counsel, knew things could be improved. She says that she felt there were opportunities for greater efficiency, quantifica-tion, engagement, and budgeting and forecasting. She had been working with about 17 different firms on about 29 matters, and legal spend was unpredictable, swinging away from projections by as much as 200 percent.

“We had a group of preferred law firms, so there were many good ones to choose from. We got high-quality services, but there was no clear path for overseeing the work that I outsourced,” Bassli says. “Further, I wanted more information and learning from the work.”

Inspired by a successful six-year relationship with Integreon Managed Solutions, a legal process outsourcer, Bassli and her team decided to take a different approach to how they used law firms for procurement contract support.

Integreon had been doing repetitive, lower-risk
contract reviews. The things that Bassli liked
about that arrangement were the insight she
got from data and metrics, the ability to make
changes, and Integreon’s focus on operational
efficiency, “in the DNA of LPOs.”
Through an RFP process, Microsoft selected
a dual-firm solution delivered jointly by Davis
Wright Tremaine (DWT) in the United States
and Addleshaw Goddard (AG) in Europe.
Addleshaw Goddard serves as a subcontractor
to DWT, an arrangement suggested by Bassli
during the RFP process (“I didn’t want two
programs and two sets of bills,” she says). The
firms were selected partly because Bassli was
“really impressed that they were interested in
new delivery models.”
Implementation of the new managed
service model comprised three major parts:
operations, technology, and substantive legal
knowledge and understanding. The operations
portion meant creating shared expectations,
establishing work processes, defining metrics
for success, and putting strong project manage-
ment principles into play. All procurement
contracts (purchasing agreements), chunked
by type, would be sent to DWT, which divided
them with AG, which would get at least 20
percent of the work.

Success metrics were laid out in service-level agreements, still rare but increasingly seen in the legal world. They stipulate target timeframes for first procedural response (six hours), first draft (three business days), and final draft (two business days). Although procurement and contracting requires higher-level negotiating skills, Bassli says the high-volume work “lends itself beautifully to pushing the envelope” and