In this customer spotlight series, Olivier Manigat, Vice President and Associate General Counsel at MillerKnoll, shares how his legal team embraced technology to become a modern and efficient in-house team.
Following the merger of Herman Miller and Knoll, MillerKnoll experienced a doubling in size and a renewed focus on compliance, cost synergy, and supplier relationships. By leveraging the PERSUIT platform, MillerKnoll successfully became more efficient as a team, controlled costs on external spend, promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from its legal suppliers, and became a data-driven legal team.
He highlights how PERSUIT helped streamline engagement with outside counsel, freeing up time for strategic initiatives. Additionally, he discusses how PERSUIT allowed for cost transparency in the firm selection process by providing clear visibility into how much they were going to spend for each matter, and being able to showcase those savings back to the company.
“PERSUIT has helped us manage legal spend because we’re clear on how much we’re going to [pay] for any matter and that’s removed the guessing,” says Manigat.
Manigat also emphasizes MillerKnoll's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), both in its workforce and in its selection of law firms. PERSUIT allows the MillerKnoll team to showcase its commitment to DEI by partnering with firms that share the same values.
For a company like MillerKnoll, Manigat can’t stress enough the importance of data-driven decision-making in evaluating law firms. “When you go through a process [for selecting firms], it’s surprising sometimes how the level of data that you receive back can differ from law firm to law firm.
When you use that data, you’re able to better evaluate who you work with, and once you engage them, you’re able to easily go back to the data to make sure that the service you’re getting meets what you had focused on [upfront],” he says.
See also from Olivier: Ensuring diversity, equity, and inclusion in the law firm selection process
