How Research Contract Consultants Achieved Significant Savings and a Stronger Legal Research Platform for Marshall Dennehey
Opacity at Contract Renewal
Marshall Dennehey is an Am Law 200 firm and one of the country’s largest litigation defense practices with roughly 500 attorneys across 19 offices. Chief Operating Officer Colleen Bannon oversees the firm’s administrative functions including real estate, HR, IT, professional development, marketing, and litigation support across all 19 offices.
Legal research is one of the few line items that touches every attorney in the firm, yet it rarely demands attention until the contract comes up for renewal. At Marshall Dennehey, that responsibility sits with Christopher Hansen, the firm’s e-discovery and litigation support director.
Legal research fell under his remit by precedent, bundled into a broader legal information resources function. As a non-lawyer who isn’t a daily user of the platforms, he relied on Bannon to interpret what the firm’s attorneys actually needed.
When the firm’s legal research contract came up for renewal after seven years, both leaders arrived at the same conclusion from different directions: neither of them had a clear read on the market.
Negotiating a Market the Firm Couldn’t Benchmark
Hansen knew how to negotiate hard but recognized that the legal research market gave him almost nothing to work with. Where electronic discovery offers dozens of competing vendors he can play against one another, legal research is effectively a two-player field: Westlaw and LexisNexis.
With so few providers, the usual levers for pressuring pricing simply weren’t there: the market itself was insulating the incumbents’ numbers. Bannon, for her part, knew the platforms from experience, but the ground had shifted: the rapid addition of AI capabilities meant that even an experienced operator couldn’t be confident she knew what a fair deal looked like anymore.
The renewal also carried real stakes beyond price. The firm runs lean, and leadership expects technology decisions to balance capability against cost rather than simply paying whatever a vendor asks. Westlaw’s renewal proposal landed without the benefit of any independent benchmark — and with newer AI tiers priced well above what the firm was currently paying, the gap between “what we have” and “what they’re quoting” was widening.
The firm had done a single round of pushback on its own and felt it had reached the limit of what it could accomplish without help.
Bringing in an Advocate with Current Market Knowledge
Bannon found Research Contract Consultants through the Association of Legal Administrators: her director of administrative services posted a request on the ALA listserv, and RCC came back as one of the firms named. Marshall Dennehey vetted two candidates and chose RCC.
What set RCC apart was a structural difference: the vendors across the table profited from a higher price, while RCC was paid to drive it down. When Bannon brought the options to the firm’s CFO, that was what landed: RCC was the only party in the room whose interests matched the firm’s own.
RCC’s entire reason for being at the table was to represent the firm’s side of it — deep, current market knowledge applied entirely on the firm’s behalf, exactly what both a non-lawyer running an unfamiliar market and an operator working to close a knowledge gap needed.
Two qualities defined the work. The first was speed and certainty: RCC could analyze a proposal, measure it against the market, and turn around a clear recommendation, always with a defined sense of how far the firm could push. The second was a willingness to be firm at the right moment — something Hansen, who negotiates hard himself, valued.
With RCC’s read on the market, the firm negotiated from a position of confidence rather than guesswork and when the incumbent wouldn’t move to a defensible number, Marshall Dennehey was prepared to walk, and did. The firm committed to moving to LexisNexis.
Bannon, handling the non-price terms, used RCC’s positioning to lock down what mattered to operations: keeping scope to litigation only, locking in negotiated features so nothing could be re-charged later, and securing the ability to spread payments for the finance team.
Significant Savings- and a Stronger Platform
The headline outcome was a dramatically better contract. RCC drove -significant savings between Westlaw’s contract proposal and the final rate all while upgrading Marshall Dennehey to a markedly more capable, AI-enabled platform on LexisNexis.
The leap in capability was just as clear. Hansen described the new LexisNexis platform as an exponential gain over the tools the firm had used for years — “an embarrassment of riches” in functionality, to the point that the exact dollar comparison between the two competing offers became immaterial next to the difference in what the firm actually gets.
With the new platform and its negotiated features in place, the firm is now focused on driving adoption so the capabilities translate into day-to-day use. RCC’s value also extended beyond the core engagement: it provided a complimentary analysis on a separate publishing-access contract, eking out additional savings the firm wouldn’t have captured on its own.
Why It Worked
For Bannon, the engagement came down to accuracy, patience, and communication: RCC told the firm what it could realistically achieve and then delivered it, without overselling. Hansen, who ran the day-to-day, saw the same from the operator’s seat: responsiveness, analytical confidence, and a willingness to be firm with vendors at exactly the right moment. Beneath all of it is the structural insight that drew the firm to RCC in the first place: in a market with too few competitors, an advocate who knows how to read it and is willing to push hard on the firm’s behalf can restore the leverage the market itself takes away.
