A joint development effort by a legal department and a firm to manage corporate-entity compliance

At Legal Tech New York, a partner from Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe described a global corporate secretarial service the firm developed in tandem with Cisco’s legal department. To comply with a raft of national requirements for the hundreds of companies Cisco maintains in more than a hundred countries, in 2007 the firm and the company licensed a hosted software package and the law firm heavily customized it. Orrick ended up taking over management of the constellation of corporate entities for an annual fixed fee, which “saved [Cisco] 15 percent the first year and 10 percent the second year.”

Based on the prototype with Cisco, the beta site so to speak, Orrick now markets its package of services and adds about four clients a year – a total of a dozen now. Orrick owns the customizations to the software and nothing was said about Cisco’s legal department retaining any rights. Perhaps the tradeoff was low-cost development swapped for letting Orrick retain marketing rights.