DWF

Firm Details

Website: www.mindcrest.com

Mindcrest People:

• Rob Marks: Chairman
• Vishal Anand: Senior Vice President
• Craig Chaplin: Commercial Director
• George Hefferan: Executive VP and Chief Legal Officer
• Donna McEnery: Global Head of Business Development and Marketing

Number of employees: 4,200

Languages: Arabic, Cantonese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Mandarin, Polish, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Urdu, Multiple Indian Languages

Firm Overview:

In 2001, two attorneys from global law firms and two engineers from Silicon Valley decided to start upon an uncharted path that would grow the legal services industry to a global scale. The founders felt strongly that the law firm business model rewarded inefficiency and below optimal outcomes to clients. Therefore, Mindcrest was founded on the belief that subject matter expertise, project management, technology and innovative service delivery will transform the legal services industry.

As the first legal services company, Mindcrest has been an Alternative Legal Services Provider (ALSP) services for 20 years, with deep subject matter expertise and many decades of combined legal experience in compliance, contracts management, legal analytics and litigation and investigations. The firm’s legal skills are enhanced by strong project management, people management, metrics and analytics and the appropriate use of technology to deliver stellar results.

Some of Mindcrest’s client relationships with leading global corporations and law firms span over a decade, which is the longest in the industry. The firm’s ‘One Team’ approach has allowed it to serve as a collaborative and trusted extension of their client teams.

In 2020, Mindcrest was acquired by DWF. DWF is a global legal business providing complex, managed and connected services, operating from 33 key locations with approximately 4,300 people. As a result, Mindcrest offers the entire range of ALSP services from multiple delivery centers in North America, Europe and Asia/Pacific.Main Areas of Practice:

Mindcrest’s four practice areas—compliance, contracts management, legal analytics and litigation and investigations cover the full breadth of alternative legal services. Compliance companies face increasing compliance risks. Heightened regulatory activity with substantial fines and penalties for compliance failures can overwhelm organisations. By leveraging resources and technology, Mindcrest has successfully delivered compliance solutions while demonstrating return on investment. The firm’s ability to structure, review and analyse large volumes of information creates effective problem-solving for even the most demanding compliance challenges.

Practice Areas

Contracts Management:

Contracts are the lifeblood of a business; an average Fortune 2000 company has tens of thousands of active contracts. Many struggle to manage contract performance across geographically dispersed locations, fragmented databases, and a combination of stakeholders with varying needs. Conventional strategies of managing contracts have led to regulatory penalties, missed deadlines, missed benefits, maverick pricing and transaction errors. Mindcrest’s contracting solutions help you manage contract risk, close more deals, improve decision-making using accurate contract data and reduce costs.

Legal Analytics:

Mindcrest converts legal data into valuable information for attorneys and business professionals by researching, tracking, analysing and summarising legal content, including case law, legislation, regulations and other legal filings, both domestic and international. For more than a decade, Mindcrest has been the indispensable resource upon which clients have depended to distill all of this legal information, demonstrating the quality and value of the firm's solutions.

Litigation & Investigations:

Companies who encounter litigation challenges require a reliable eDiscovery solution. With more than 20 years of experience on some of the largest and most complex eDiscovery projects, the specialised teams combined with the best of technology and proprietary processes deliver cost-effective managed review solutions and thus earned the trust of clients.

What Makes Mindcrest Different?

The Mindcrest Method:

Over the last 19 years, Mindcrest has developed its unique methodology for project management, providing transparency, quality assurance, technology utilisation and delivering actionable metrics. Within the Mindcrest Method, each one of its seasoned lawyers makes ‘Quality First’ their guiding principle, and thus all take pride in producing exemplary work and excellent client service using tested and proven QA and KC methodologies.

mTech:

mTech is Mindcrest’s two-pronged approach to technology: one side involves a team that routinely tests leading industry technologies, evaluates them based on a robust set of criteria and ensures that Mindcrest’s recommendations are suitable solutions for each client’s specific needs; the other is an agile workflow management application which allows Mindcrest to track KPIs, which are customisable for each client to use as their own workflow platform.

Mindcrest University:

Mindcrest University is the preeminent training program in the industry, as it offers onboarding and ongoing training with more than 100 courses on substantive legal issues to courses on leadership, project management and technology. It fosters an environment of continuous learning to ensure that training has residual long-term effects in work efficiency. Mindcrest provides customised learning options for each distinct training instance as an investment in the development and empowerment of a client’s workforce. Training materials developed by Mindcrest University are designed are thoroughly understood by the client’s team and continuously implemented to fit their project management needs.