On the Cusp of the Next Decade: A Look Forward and Back

This has been a transformative decade for the legal industry – and for HBR Consulting, as well. At the outset of the current decade, the legal industry was beginning to emerge from a recession. The decade saw a growing focus on value in legal service delivery, the rise of legal operations as a discipline, an abundant array of new technologies to help law departments and law firms better manage the business of law, and an evolving alignment with the voice of the client culminating in leading legal organizations’ desire to collaborate and co-innovate.

While our consulting industry roots go back much further, HBR Consulting launched in 2011 to provide law firm and law departments with advisory, managed services and software solutions. We have grown and matured alongside the legal industry, and we take pride in the role we have played in shaping the industry’s evolution. Earlier this year, HBR’s success through 2018 received national recognition: we were included in the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies. That recognition reflected our growth from 120 employees at the end of 2015 to more than 300 at the end of 2018, and our proportionate revenue growth of 157% in the same period.

But we haven’t stopped there. 2019 has been a remarkable year of continued success, transition and growth for HBR.

Business model

As trusted advisors at the intersection between law firms and law departments, we have observed that legal organizations are most successful when they align strategically, operationally and, most importantly, with a client-facing focus. To align and respond to market changes and our clients’ related needs, HBR began the year with an internal organizational change. The changes, driven in part by client requests for evolving, innovative services and practice areas, have allowed us to expand our capabilities and strengthen our bench of subject matter experts.

Innovative client projects

Some of our 2019 projects have included the following:

• Helping legal organizations define frameworks to guide innovation investments
• Helping law firms craft business plans for productizing and taking new solutions to market
• Facilitating co-innovation summits between law firms and their law department clients to foster these and other innovations
• Continuing to evolve our data services and analytics offerings to help our clients better manage, gain actionable insights, and guide collaboration between law departments and law firms
• Helping law firms offset their investments in innovative and practice-focused initiatives, by providing managed services to help reduce their investments in non-differentiating infrastructure functions such as IT, procurement, and research and library services
• Improving the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of legal organizations’ operations, through strategy development, maximizing their use of resources, purchasing and vendor governance support, process and technology recommendations and implementation, and more
• Expanding the software services that support our advisory consulting

Continued growth of our bench of experts

We take pride in our ability to attract top talent from the market, as our bench of experts continues to expand. In 2019 alone, we welcomed 89 new employees – our team now spans 28 states and four countries. Our experts span a range of skills and certifications – from attorneys, PMP project management professionals and Six Sigma certified consultants to software developers, engineers, data scientists and security specialists. And we are investing in ongoing talent development. To help guide that effort, we recruited Tenia Davis to our executive team as Chief Talent and Administrative Services Officer. 

Thought leadership

We provide forward-thinking thought leadership, including white papers, blog posts, infographics and more, housed on our website and shared in our “Insights” newsletters launched this year; industry-leading surveys such as our 16th annual Law Department Survey; leadership at major industry conferences such as CLOC and ILTACON, as well as our own Legal Lab, an invitation-only forum fostering open dialogue among leaders across the legal ecosystem; and contributed articles and interviews in a range of well-respected industry publications.

Looking forward

And, of course, our revenue continues to grow as well. We expect to maintain the trajectory announced in Inc. 5000 through this year and beyond, as we further evolve to meet our clients’ expanding needs.

With growth and transition come challenges and opportunities. We continue to make strategic investments in our internal operations, to keep them scalable for our ongoing growth. We are constantly expanding our services and solutions in response to our clients’ requests and evolving needs.  

2020 and the next decade promise to be as exciting as the last. We look forward to continuing our journey, building on our deep-rooted history in the industry, the depth and breadth of our experience, and our meaningful partnerships with industry-leading law firms and law departments. Together, we all succeed.

We are grateful to our extraordinary team and the exceptional clients who join us as we advance into the next decade.

Thank you and Happy New Year!

Chris Petrini-Poli
Executive Chairman

Nick Quil
Chief Executive Officer