Gary Porter, a seasoned business leader and former attorney, serves as a Senior Principal Consultant within the Law and Advisory Services, Digital Transformation, Strategy & Innovation, and Corporate Performance practice groups of P&C Global. He also supports a range of special initiatives within P&C Global such as those related to client engagement. With more than 20 years of experience spanning legal and other professional services, financial services, private equity, technology, environmental, and global logistics industries, Porter’s domain expertise includes strategy, digital transformation, mergers and acquisitions, finance, marketing, logistics, customer experience, operations, and procurement.
Porter began his career at the intersection of business and law, having served as a Summer Associate during law school for both a global law firm and management consultancy. Following graduation, he joined McKinsey & Company, where he led multinational assignments predominantly in the industrial and logistics sectors. He subsequently accepted a leadership opportunity at Waste Management, North America’s largest environmental services firm with $13B in annual revenues, where he honed corporate strategy and successfully led a multi-year digital transformation program across several core functional domains that impacted tens of thousands of employees. While at Waste Management, he also oversaw an active mergers and acquisitions program involving several hundred closed transactions.
While at P&C Global, Porter has spearheaded transformation programs to drive material value for law firm clients. For example:
- Comprehensive Transformation of Premier Plaintiffs’ Bar Law Firm: In conjunction with a new generation of Managing Shareholder leadership, Porter and his team engaged in a broad modernization program for core capabilities including Document Management, eDiscovery, and Business Analytics. In parallel with this digital transformation, the P&C Global team dramatically impacted several other key domains including practice mix, leverage ratios between senior and junior personnel, compensation strategy, and administrative leadership. Taken together, these improvements across the course of an 18-month engagement almost doubled profits per equity partner.
- Practice and Case Management Modernization for a Nationally Recognized Law Firm: In response to a monolithic legacy system that is rapidly nearing end of life, Porter led a sustained program to systematically transition the firm to a suite of best of breed, commercial-off-the-shelf solutions which delivered a 26% reduction annual total operating costs of the technology platform as compared to the legacy systems and a 15% reduction in total operating costs of the firm which enabled the next phase of growth. At the same time, his team addressed several other complementary work streams to unlock value such as the recruiting of a new Chief Technology Officer and Head of Human Resources and Talent Acquisition; restructuring and significantly increasing the risk management posture of the firm via newly structured professional liability and property and casualty insurance programs by increasing coverage and improving contractual levers while reducing cost of insurance premiums by 18% per annum.
Outside of P&C, Porter is focused upon his family. His wife, a former telecommunications attorney, provides him a vivid reminder of the day-to-day pressures and dynamics faced by legal and other professional services practitioners. Together, they are raising their two sons, one of whom is an Eagle Scout who just started college and the other is a freshman in high school on a similar path. In his spare time, Porter is an avid health enthusiast, taking time to work out virtually every day. He has also volunteered with various local organizations such as serving as a Board Member of the Hermann Park Conservancy in Houston.