Throughout my legal career, the themes of creativity, technology, operational efficiency, and organizational strategy have repeatedly surfaced as major influences and priorities driving my daily work – topics not commonly associated with the traditional practice of law.

However, much of my time as a lawyer has been spent focused on these issues and employing them in the “alternative” practice of law: operating within a rapidly evolving legal and regulatory environment; using numbers and data to understand legal risks, measure outcomes, and make the business case for organizational change; assembling and leading teams that apply an operational mindset to managing legal work; collaborative approaches to legal problem-solving; and thinking unconventionally about how lawyers and their teams can make their own lives, and those of their clients, easier through innovation and technology.

Joining QuisLex was a natural progression after first working on courtroom technology initiatives as a law clerk at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, cutting my teeth in discovery at Covington & Burling, moving to Bangalore to manage offshore legal delivery for another ALSP, and then finally joining the in-house legal team at JPMorgan Chase. In my nine years there, I played a role in departmental transformation by wearing my “lawyer hat” to measure and describe risks, while simultaneously pushing the envelope on technology, right-sourcing, and process streamlining (which was a lot of fun and a great challenge for me). I began by first focusing on non-standard data types like voice data for the bank’s legal discovery team, then gradually moved into all sorts of other interesting things, including owning the legal hold program and overseeing an internal legal technology and automation program. One of my most rewarding experiences was spending three years on an expat assignment in Argentina spinning up offshore legal teams at the bank’s Buenos Aires Corporate Center. How to choose which path to take when taking on a legal department transformation – building a new team, growing an existing team, or partnering – is something I wrote about in this eBook.

Over the years, I’d acquainted myself with several people at QuisLex and learned of the company’s excellent reputation within my network of in-house colleagues, making this a perfect fit when I came aboard last year. Here, I’m able to put my skills and strengths to good use while working with a diverse team of dedicated, highly capable legal professionals.

My role involves both operational work and helping QuisLex increase its presence in the market. I like keeping my hands directly on the work product while also getting the opportunity to build new service lines, work with new clients, and continue to expand and demonstrate the value that QuisLex brings to the table.

I love using my experience with large, complex organizations to make life demonstrably better for in-house legal and compliance teams. Seeing them understand and then buy into the change from the current state to where they aspire to be is very satisfying. Seeing them adopt new ways to speed up legal work and make it more data-driven, while decreasing waste, risks, costs, and administrative hassles at the same time, is invigorating.

Since joining QuisLex, I’ve mostly worked on developing new, modern use cases for managed legal services. This requires me to keep my ear to the ground and continue to focus on learning, given how quickly the market moves. I’m enjoying the fast pace of change surrounding all of us operating in this space, and my goal is to help clients embrace it in order to continue pushing their departments forward, while learning from all of the upheaval we’ve seen over the last several years in the legal industry. Speaking of which, I’ve been so impressed since joining QuisLex by my colleagues’ comprehensive expertise, not only with the subject matter of the topics we deal with, but also how they effectively and seamlessly apply prior knowledge and lessons learned on new projects. They continually surprise me with their ingenuity, hustle, and sound analytical judgment.

Those qualities help us provide thoughtful, world-class work product delivered by team members with years of experience who are invested in the success of our clients. The depth of knowledge and the continuity of faces and names staffing our projects over the course of the years are what I believe sets us apart from our competition. In addition, the team’s ability to be flexible and creative, in order to provide more tailored solutions for uncommon challenges, is unmatched. Creativity is a grossly underrated skill in our industry, and the problems we face are simply not solvable with cookie-cutter approaches. This is our philosophy at QuisLex, and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to work with a team that not only believes in it but consistently embodies this principle in our work.

Brian is the Vice President, Legal Solutions and Operational Excellence at QuisLex

Based in Berlin, Brian brings nearly 20 years of experience in the legal industry to QuisLex. Most recently he served as Executive Director, Assistant General Counsel with JPMorgan Chase, managing teams spread across four continents and overseeing a global partnership between lawyers, technologists, data analysts, law firms, and ALSPs to deliver enterprise-class software and legal automation solutions to the firm. He is a devoted dad and husband, an avid traveler, and an enthusiastic food nerd who grew up loving music. He was the drum major of his high school marching band and played low brass in the marching band at Florida State University.