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Colleen has over 12 years of experience as an attorney and legal business consultant. She has consulted over 29 corporate legal departments and state governments in areas of legal strategic management, cost reduction initiatives, litigation management, organizational structure redesign, outside counsel management, and leadership development.
Professional Experience
Prior to Huron, Colleen worked as a legal business consultant for Deloitte and Arthur Andersen. Previously, she practiced law as a trial lawyer in Chicago. Representative examples of Colleen's engagement experience include:
Law Department Strategic Management
For the Licensing, Trademark, and M&A groups within a corporate law department, provided a business case in support of adding more attorneys in order for the legal groups to be aligned with the corporation's aggressive growth strategies. Redesigned the organizational structure and communication procedures, provided extensive process, operation, and technology. recommendations, and compiled benchmarks.
Led annual strategic legal management projects aimed at analyzing attorney resources in each of nine legal groups within a Fortune 100 company. Assessed recent cost-savings initiatives, determined current and future headcount needs, performed a workload analysis, developed a risk analysis if additional headcount needs were not met, and prepared a peer attorney resources benchmarking study.
For an 800 personnel corporate law department, conducted an assessment for immediate and long-term cost reductions in order to reduce the legal budget by 25% without increasing risk. Analyzed outside counsel and internal roles and responsibilities, provided an early case assessment strategy and managed a convergence project for outside counsel, and developed outside counsel guidelines and new hiring requirements and budgeting procedures.
Cost Reduction Initiative
For a governmental law department, guided a process re-engineering project focusing on revising the management structure, designing executive level financial reports and automating multiple support processes. Reviewed outside counsel policies and procedures and provided recommendations on claims handling, external counsel management, claims and case assignments, reviews, and case assessment processes in order to reduce the state's legal budget by 8-10%.
For a national insurance company, developed litigation cost reduction initiatives aimed at reducing outside counsel expenditures of approximately $900M. Assisted in the convergence of 1200 outside counsel firms, formation of a partnering program, development of a strategic national sourcing initiative, and formation of an early case assessment program.
For a large software company, assisted in the design and implementation of a Preferred Partnering Program.
Litigation Management
Reviewed the litigation cases of a large corporate legal department and accelerated the closing of between 5-10% of the caseload through analyzing each case and providing settlement strategies and settlement verdict ranges.
Developed and implemented the budgeting process for a pharmaceutical company's outside counsel.
New Law Department Creation
Created the corporate legal department strategy and goals for a new law department. Assisted senior executives with the organizational structure, the legal skills needed for this industry, recommended outside counsel law firms, provided outside counsel guidelines, articulated legal staffing roles and responsibilities and budget recommendations.
Education & Certifications
Juris Doctor, DePaul University College of Law
Master of Business Administration, DePaul University Kellstadt Graduate School of Business
Bachelor of Arts, Knox College, Galesburg, IL
Admitted to the practice of law for the state, federal bar, and federal trial bar of Illinois
Trial Lawyers Club of Chicago certification
Professional Associations
40 Illinois Attorneys Under 40 to Watch in 2002
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