UnitedLex CEO James Schellhase recently sat down for an extended interview with Law360’s Sarah Martinson. The Q&A, published June 17, covered his vision for UnitedLex, how he views his role, and the importance of keeping a balance between customers, employees and the board. Here is a brief excerpt:
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Q: What do you specifically want to accomplish in your role?
A: “…what I want to do is to have such an efficient operating model and an execution mindset within the company that we grow organically, and we don’t accomplish our growth goals simply by doing acquisition. We do it profitably. The people who benefit from this are the employees, investors and clients. We keep costs down. We do things better, faster and cheaper than the competition.”
Q: Is building a culture of transparency and integrity part of your vision or plan for employee retention?
A: “It is. We’re enjoying, right now, very low employee turnover. We’ve changed a lot of cultural things within the company and our [net promoter score] internally, just for the full disclosure, went up 14 points in the last six months. So, I think that a lot of things we’re doing are resonating. The transparency with the employees has been phenomenally accepted, the openness of communication, good, bad or indifferent, for what’s going on, but we’ve had a lot of good news to share with them. They were part of the culture realignment, and so people really appreciated that.”
Q: How does the company plan to set itself apart from competitors?
A: “We think that we are clearly first to market in most of the new areas that people are getting into with the [alternative legal service providers] discussion. We were there a long time ago. So, we have many years of experience with that and we’ll continue to distinguish ourselves from that. We will be going to other areas to the general counsel and the other risk constituents of our companies, and we’ll distinguish ourselves by trying to solve these problems with e-discovery and other general counsel issues through technology or through cutting costs, with being able to accomplish certain tasks in our Indian operations or other operations that we have. So that’s really how we’re planning on distinguishing ourselves.”
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UnitedLex is as committed as ever to helping clients innovate, weaponize their data, and drive organizational value through their legal departments, but a lot has changed since James took the helm in the fall of 2023. We’re building a culture that strengthens relationships with customers, employees and leadership. Drop us a line to find out how these changes can benefit your organization and consider reading Sarah Martinson’s recent article.
The full Q&A covers much more ground, and is well worth reading: https://www.law360.com/pulse/legal-tech/articles/1847818
