Fifty years after the founding of MMR Strategy Group, MMR President Dr. Bruce Isaacson feels the company is doing better than it ever has.
“The past five or six years in particular have been fantastic for MMR, and we’ve been gratified to have the opportunity to work with great clients on very interesting and high-profile matters,” he says. “And we have very, very good testifying experts, supported by an outstanding support staff.”
But as MMR grew, he says, the company got “too big to be simple,” and administrative work expanded beyond capacity. That’s one reason why, about a month ago, Dr. Isaacson agreed to make MMR a part of litigation consulting and support firm IMS Legal Strategies. The two companies’ integration was officially announced May 15.
MMR’s day-to-day work hasn’t changed, and clients will still work with the same personnel on the same types of projects, at the same rates. However becoming part of IMS will allow MMR to have support in back-office functions, such as billing and recruiting, and offers MMR access to projects through the IMS expert witness recruiting network. Over time, MMR may offer litigation support services that IMS already offers, such as surveys for trial strategy consulting, surveys for jury research, economic modeling, and other types of expert witness services.
That was another reason for the alliance, he says. IMS provides those services to the same types of clients MMR serves, he says, and often in the context of the same kind of high-stakes litigation MMR handles.
Building MMR to this point wasn’t always easy. Dr. Isaacson’s background is in business, not law. After an academic career that included earning a doctorate in marketing at Harvard Business School, Dr. Isaacson worked as a consultant and a marketer in corporate settings. In the early days of MMR, the work was largely marketing research—but over time, it has evolved into a workload heavy with expert witness surveys and rebuttals for litigation, particularly trademark and false advertising litigation.
One way MMR has handled that change is to just keep learning—from its projects, from authorities in the field, and from each other. The company runs regular professional development sessions for project staff, and the projects themselves are also learning opportunities. In fact, one reason Dr. Isaacson enjoys being an expert witness is because the work can be educational.
“My favorite kinds of projects are the projects where I’m not sure, when we start, how we should proceed or how it will turn out,” he says. “Not only do we get to be puzzle solvers, which for me is great fun, but we then have the opportunity to … teach clients, and even juries or courts, about the solutions that we’ve developed.”
When he’s not teaching juries and courts about survey research, Dr. Isaacson enjoys the outdoors—hiking, swimming, and backcountry skiing. That last activity isn’t something he does in Los Angeles, where MMR is based, but in the mountains of eastern California, near Mammoth Lakes. He also enjoys spending time with his two dogs, six children, and two grandchildren.
That time has been limited lately, as MMR and IMS do the slow but worthwhile work of combining shops. But Dr. Isaacson is expecting good things. One thing that attracted him to IMS was the company’s emphasis on its core values, which include collaboration, servant leadership, and a focus on relationships.
“I trust them as being people who do what they say they will do, and who have high standards and … core values, that will guide their interactions with MMR clients and with MMR staff,” he says. “My hope is that the path that we’ve been on in recent years will continue and only accelerate.”