Lisa Hart Shepherd
CEO, Acritas
After working in analyst and business planning roles for eight years, Lisa founded Acritas in 2002 to fill a gap in the legal services industry of robust global market research data combined with deep sector knowledge. During this time, Lisa has worked on projects with most of the world’s largest law firms, devising research programs to help clients achieve service excellence, brand strength, people engagement and international growth.
A decade ago, Lisa developed an annual global market study, Sharplegal, which evaluates trends in in-house counsel attitudes and buying behaviors, including the perception of law firm brands. It is the world’s most comprehensive annual study of the legal market, encompassing over $10 million worth of data.
Over the last three years, Lisa and her team have developed a second global dataset, Acritas Stars. This database of high-performing lawyers is driven purely by client nominations and encompasses an annual survey of those Stars to evaluate how well firms develop, engage, retain and attract Star Lawyers.
More recently, Lisa has turned her attention to developing analytics tools for legal departments to help them understand global patterns in legal spend and team size and to offer peer benchmarks. Lisa has also developed a suite of metrics, the PEER Model, to help legal departments drive high performance.