Marley-Wylain Company

Marley-Wylain Company faced a sprawling portfolio of asbestos-related litigation — a high-volume, long-tail liability category that generates thousands of active claims simultaneously across multiple jurisdictions. Without centralized coordination, asbestos defense programs typically suffer from duplicated efforts, inconsistent settlement strategies, and opaque cost structures that make legal spend unpredictable year over year. Marley-Wylain's prior arrangements lacked the data infrastructure to prioritize high-risk claims proactively, leaving the company exposed to reactive case management, escalating outside counsel fees, and limited visibility into portfolio-level risk — a costly status quo that demanded a structural rethink.

Husch Blackwell's Asbestos Defense Solutions Team assumed the national coordinating counsel (NCC) role for Marley-Wylain beginning May 1, 2019, implementing both a structural and technological overhaul. The firm's IT professionals built HB Vault, a custom integrated data platform managing hundreds of fields across thousands of individual claims. HB Vault includes a file system compatible with Marley-Wylain's internal resources and syncs directly with Husch Blackwell's proprietary e-billing portal, enabling real-time visibility into cost and risk across the full portfolio. Analytics and business intelligence capabilities embedded in the platform allow the legal team to identify emerging risk clusters and shift priorities immediately as new data surfaces. The engagement was structured on a fixed-fee NCC model, deliberately aligning firm incentives with the client's cost-reduction objectives rather than billable hour accumulation.

Within ten months of assuming the NCC role, the initiative delivered measurable, documented outcomes that exceeded Marley-Wylain's prior performance benchmarks:

• 30%+ reduction in legal costs within the first ten months of operation
• Real-time risk prioritization across thousands of active claims via the HB Vault platform
• CLOC 2020 LIO Project award — selected as one of three firms in the inaugural class honoring legal operations innovation
• Back-to-back ACC Value Champion recognitions for demonstrable client value delivery

Beyond the cost metrics, the project established a replicable model for high-volume asbestos defense that combined fixed-fee pricing discipline with data-driven claim management — a combination recognized industry-wide as best practice.

• Fixed-fee NCC structures directly align law firm incentives with client cost-reduction goals, removing the inherent conflict in hourly billing for high-volume litigation.
• Centralizing claim-level data across hundreds of fields into a single platform is a prerequisite for portfolio-scale risk prioritization — piecemeal tracking cannot surface emerging patterns in time.
• Real-time sync between case management systems and e-billing portals gives in-house legal teams the cost visibility needed to make informed resourcing decisions.
• Industry recognition (CLOC, ACC) can serve as a signal-quality benchmark when evaluating whether a proposed legal operations transformation is genuinely differentiated or incremental.