Ep 153: From Radical to Trailblazer: How Innovative GC Jeffrey Carr Disrupted the Legal Department, Part 2

In this second of a two-part interview, we continue our conversation with Jeffrey Carr, a trailblazing general counsel who describes his career as decades spent on the radical fringe of reforming legal services delivery. Many of his ideas for revamping legal departments, once viewed as radical, have now become mainstream. 

As general counsel at FMC Technologies in the early 2000s, Carr disrupted how legal departments hire and compensate outside counsel, creating models that today are considered standard operating procedure at many companies. 

After retiring from FMC in 2014, he went on to work with Valorem Law, one of the earliest law firms to focus on making alternative fee arrangements the norm. Valorem became the progenitor of ElevateNext, the law firm affiliate of the global law company Elevate. Carr returned to a GC role in 2019 at Univar Solutions, where he sought to build the law department of the future. Now retired, he teaches, writes, and pursues his hobby of driving race cars. 

Last week, in part one of the interview, Carr spoke with host Bob Ambrogi about how he landed on the “radical fringe” of reforming legal services, and he discussed some of the trailblazing initiatives he created at FMC, including the Alliance Counsel Engagement System, or ACES, a method of hiring outside counsel so unique that he was encouraged to patent it.

In this second installment of the interview, Carr discusses another of the initiatives for which he is known, the Litigation Value Challenge, which came to be emulated by the Association of Corporate Counsel and many of its members. Carr and Ambrogi also dive into his recent post at Bill Henderson’s Legal Evolution blog, Four Waves of Change in #LawLand, in which he lays out his framework for making the legal system better. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out. 

• Legalweek 2022, returning in person to New York City March 8-11, 2022, Legalweek will bring together thousands of legal leaders for a week-long program featuring TED-style focus talks, workshop boot camps, and panel sessions across 21 tracks and 74 sessions.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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