In this customer spotlight series, Ashley Woodill, Senior Vice President and Assistant General Counsel at Wells Fargo, discusses how her team moved to value-based pricing with PERSUIT.
"I really think it all started when our CEO and CFO's office came to our legal department and said, 'We really need to better manage our legal spend. Go off and do that, and tell me how you're doing that,'" Woodill explains.
PERSUIT gives Ashley and her Wells Fargo legal team a structured, efficient process for selecting outside counsel - a process that leads to troves of data. Using that data, Ashley is able to solidify legal's stance as a strategic partner to the business.
"PERSUIT has helped us demonstrate that we are not complacent, that we're always trying to identify new, innovative techniques that work for the legal department to help manage this external legal spend. The built in reporting and tools in Persuit have allowed us to demonstrate that quite easily," Woodill says.
A key part of this entire process was Wells decision to move to value-based pricing, which improves outcomes for both her in-house team and their preferred law firms.
But for a company as large as Wells Fargo, there were concerns that certain matters would be too complex to use fixed-fee pricing, or alternative fee arrangements (AFA).
When putting PERSUIT to the test, Ashley quickly debunked that myth, discussing how she and her team use an iterative process with their firms.
Sometimes her team will ask firms upfront how they would approach a certain matter under an AFA before drafting the request in PERSUIT. The responses she gets back from firms tell her how creative they'll be in their approach with Wells. That then fuels the basis for scoping the request and driving the desired outcomes for both sides.
"We find when we run this process on complex matters, the responses we get back from our firms -- theirs assumptions, exclusions, and scope of work -- are wildly similar. That's been really, really helpful for us."
