Allison Guidette is the VP and General Manager of Westlaw Litigation, of which Westlaw Round Table Group is a proud part. She recently took some time to answer some questions for me about the future of WRTG, and some broader insights into the legal industry.

"Why this foray into the expert witness referral industry?

Westlaw Round Table Group is a natural and valuable addition to Thomson Reuter's expanding suite of integrated litigation content, tools and services -- collectively called Westlaw Litigator. Westlaw Litigator is designed to meet the evolving needs of litigators by helping them at each stage of a case to optimize productivity and produce the highest quality work product in the least amount of time.

We repeatedly go back to our clients to ask them how else Thomson Reuters can support them. In the past year, we have heard repeated request for better, faster access to the world's best expert witnesses. Clients tell us that finding ideal experts can be time consuming and frustrating. In response, Thomson Reuters began looking for a partner, which brought us to the door of Round Table Group, the premier expert witness referral business in the legal industry. We of course acquired Round Table Group - now called Westlaw Round Table Group (WRTG) - about three months ago.

Our clients have expressed great enthusiasm for this new line of business and the quality and service they can receive from the WRTG team. Most critically, they share that leveraging WRTG saves them valuable time - that they can better deploy in legal thinking and writing - and that WRTG finds them superior experts than they would be able to uncover on their own.

"Can you offer some insight into industry trends?"

We perceive a number of critical trends impacting the legal industry, including:
-    Cautious optimism by large and small firms that we have "bottomed out" in most practice areas and work is beginning to pick up. That said, litigation is recovering more slowly than other practice areas - such as in corporate - but it is starting to grow again.
-    Continued focus by corporate clients on getting value from outside counsel. Even when legal budgets are freer and litigation more voluminous, we anticipate that corporate legal departments will remain focused on getting more from each hour worked by their counsel. Also, GCs are less willing to pay junior associates to learn how to practice law, forcing law firms to rethink their business models somewhat. There is some pressure to explore "alternative fee arrangements" but our sense is that most corporations are not interested in fixed-fee projects for anything but truly routine matters. What they want is value and predictability.
-    We expect MDLs and class actions to grow significantly in the next year. Certainly the Gulf oil spill is one example but we have seen a significant uptick in MDLs in the past few years which we do not see abating. Related, we see smaller firms remaining focused on their niche practice areas but banding together in loose teams to support the needs of large, complex cases and competing with bigger firms.
-    E-discovery continues to drain litigation resources. That said, firms are again beginning to invest in tools to manage e-discovery. They want tools that integrate together, making it easy to toggle from one stage of a case (say, legal research) to another (say, case analysis). This is very consistent with the strategy of Thomson Reuters, where our litigation technologies interrelate in very meaningful ways to ease the work of our litigation clients.

"Anything new our experts can expect to see in the weeks/months ahead rising from our merger?" 

I think that the merger of Thomson Reuters and Round Table Group creates great opportunities for both organizations and our expert partners. Certainly the Westlaw brand and resources will help to fuel growth of Round Table Group, creating more interesting cases for our expert partners. Additionally, West is historically a publishing house, so there may be more avenues to explore with our partners in creating content. Finally, we have plans - with the approval of our expert partners - to leverage Westlaw.com and the new platform, WestlawNext, to expose our experts to literally millions of attorneys worldwide. This should create great opportunities for interesting cases.

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