Company With Roots In Serving Investors Aims To Disrupt Expert Witness Business
Two high-profile hires signal a new, more aggressive phase of building its legal business.
Many in the legal profession may never have heard of Gerson Lehrman Group, even though it is the world’s largest company providing expert consultants to investors and business professionals in virtually every sector. But over the last five years, the company has quietly expanded into the legal world, providing experts and expert witnesses for litigation and other matters. Now the company has made two hires that signal a new, more aggressive phase of building its legal business, which it calls GLG Law.
GLG has hired David Solomon, former director of financial services at legal services innovator Axiom Global, to be GLG Law’s first dedicated general manager, and David Perla, former president of Bloomberg BNA Legal and cofounder of legal-process outsourcing trailblazer Pangea3 (not to mention, Above the Law columnist), as senior advisor.
During a conference call last week with Solomon, Perla and Nick Barnard, head of GLG’s Professional Services Firms division, Perla told me that, until recently, GLG Law – started five years ago – has been a growing but not core part of the company’s business.
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“Over the last few years, that business has really accelerated and grown to the point that GLG realized it had the opportunity to make it a real scaling business,” Perla said. “The company decided to invest heavily, both to accelerate growth and bring in senior leadership.”
The primary focus of GLG Law is assisting law firms with identifying and retaining testifying and consulting experts. It does this through a proprietary formula of process and technology and by tapping into a network of more than 500,000 experts – whom GLG calls council members – throughout the world. (Disclosure: I have served in the past as a member on a couple of brief consulting engagements.)
Solomon first encountered the challenges of identifying well-qualified expert witnesses as a young associate at Anderson Kill & Olick working on the Enron litigation, where he was tasked with finding an expert on complex oil and gas sale regulations. When the opportunity came along to join GLG Law, he saw an opening for a company to differentiate itself in the expert witness field.
“It struck me that this was an area of the legal industry that felt like it was at an inflection point, ripe for someone to come in with some disruption and innovation,” Solomon said. “We believe GLG’s mix of people, process and proprietary technology is a tremendous competitive advantage, and we already have 500,000 of the world’s top experts and a dedicated recruiting process.”
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GLG was founded in 1998 by two Yale Law School classmates, Thomas Lehrman and Mark Gerson. They started out publishing industry guidebooks for institutional investors. Within a year, however, they pivoted to developing a network of experts who could provide one-to-one consultations with investors performing research into industries or companies.
Over time, their clientele expanded to include a range of business professionals and professional-services firms. Today, GLG is no longer the only expert network – or, as it prefers to call itself, professional learning network. It is, however, the largest, with 22 offices in 12 countries and clients and experts throughout the world.
So how does GLG Law differentiate itself from other expert-witness services? Perla believes it is its ability to find just the right expert for just the right need. When a law firm needs a highly specialized expert for a very specific issue, he said, GLG is highly skilled both at finding just the right person – whether from within or without its member network – and at precisely understanding what the firm plans to do with the expert and the type of expert it needs.
For the experts in its database, GLG develops rich profiles and taxonomies, based on information provided by the experts and on feedback provided by clients who use them. GLG researchers work with clients to help them quickly find the right person. GLG also provides a web portal through which clients and experts schedule calls and it handles all contracts, invoicing and payments.
“We are focused on speed and turnaround time, but also on providing highly curated results,” Solomon said. “We don’t want them to have to do a lot of leg work. We have the ability to – at scale and with speed – provide a very curated list, so the client is easily able to get to the right person.”
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With GLG Law’s hiring of Solomon and Perla, the company will now be focused on building broader awareness of itself. Solomon, who at Axiom ran its largest sales team focused on investment banks and financial services, will manage GLG Law. Perla will concentrate on strategy to accelerate the business’s growth.
Solomon sees GLG Law’s position today as similar to Axiom’s a few years ago. “It was providing a service that others were also trying to provide, but it was doing it better and it needed to get that message out. Part of what I’m doing now is looking at how we educate the legal industry about the value we can bring to them.”
He encourages lawyers to at least try GLG Law as a gut check against how they typically find experts. GLG works with lawyers to screen experts at no charge, and clients incur fees only as they retain and begin using a GLG expert.
Perla agreed. “This is much more about education than persuasion. When I talk to lawyers, not one argued the point that there had to be a better way. We want to get the word out there.”
Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).
