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  • Board of Directors
    • Joseph D. Freedman
    • Courtney B. Sapire
    • Michael Hickey
    • Kent Kirby
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    • Jon Dyck
  • Executive Team
    • Pratik Patel
    • Jeffrey G. Bunting
    • Tom Nebel
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Pratik K. Patel | Vice President - Business Development & Services

Mr. Patel has over 11 years of experience in the legal industry and 8 years of experience serving as a trusted advisor and change agent to major US corporate legal departments and government agencies.  Prior to joining RFx Legal, Mr. Patel served as a legal management and strategy consultant within Huron Legal, where he advised corporate legal department clients on complex operational issues related to the business of law.  Specifically, Mr. Patel worked closely with General Counsels, Law Department Managers and Legal Finance Managers to develop strategic roadmaps for optimizing various areas of their operations, including legal spend management, outside counsel management, legal sourcing, matter management, e-billing, contract management, legal holds, e-discovery and document management.  

Among his various areas of expertise, Mr. Patel’s most valuable asset offering comes in the area of legal spend management and advisory services.   During the economic downturn, Mr. Patel assisted numerous clients seeking to better align cost and value associated with use of outside legal services. Within those engagements, Mr. Patel dove deep to understand his client’s legal business goals and based on them, developed tangible roadmaps for achieving cost savings while enhancing experience and service quality received by outside counsel. 

Some of Mr. Patel’s most relevant case studies are represented below:

• Mr. Patel led a team analyzing a F50 law department’s legal spend management processes.  The goal of the project was to pinpoint assumed but unconfirmed gaps in cost, usage and management of outside counsel across the enterprise.  Mr. Patel’s team found significant irregularities and inconsistencies in law firm selection processes, negotiation strategies, law firm staffing models, timekeeper rates, timekeeper billing methods, and expense-to-fee ratios for similar types of matters.  The inconsistencies in these areas were causing upwards of 30% missed cost savings opportunities.  At the conclusion of the project, Mr. Patel and his team were able to immediately reduce legal spend by 8% and provided to the client specific recommendations and tools for achieving the remaining 22% cost savings through more information-based negotiations with their preferred counsel.
• Mr. Patel was requested by a F500 company’s law department to assist in developing a program to drive more information-based decision making.  The engagement included reviewing current state legal department processes and technology to identify potential areas of efficiency leakage because of non-optimized use of data.  Mr. Patel and his team successfully designed and implemented a program, which included improvements to both internal processes and technology, that enabled in-house attorney to dynamically track and report on data relevant to their specific area of law.  The result of this program was significant cost savings, both internally and externally, which was credited to an increased ability for in-house counsel to better manage outside counsel and drive matter-related decisions based on transparent and relevant data. 

Mr. Patel holds a Bachelors in Business Administration with a focus in Electrical Engineering and Finance from the University of Texas at Austin.