Aurelia Spivey, Marketing Consultant with BigHand, chats with Keith Maziarek, Director of Pricing and Legal Project Management at Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP. Keith is responsible for building the firm’s formal pricing and legal project management functions.
Prior to Katten, Keith served as Senior Director of Client Value for Perkins Coie LLP, working closely with the client legal operations executives to develop collaboration strategies to improve operational efficiencies. Keith’s career in strategic pricing began at DLA Piper LLP, where he built the firm’s strategic pricing, profitability, and legal project management functions as the firm’s first Head of Strategic Pricing. He previously worked in strategic business development, helping establish a deep understanding of clients’ business needs.
Keith frequently speaks at industry events and publishes articles on related topics. He holds an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.S. in Business Management from the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Top three takeaways from this episode
I look at the pricing exercise as being a multidimensional thing and there's a place in it for referencing past matter data from similar matters, but then you don't want to necessarily work under the assumption that was perfect or that those scoping elements were exactly the same, but it's a good reference point.
Podcast Transcript:
Keith Maziarek
For being a practitioner, that day to day sees multiple examples on a daily basis and a weekly basis, how the psychological impressions or signals that are sent through sort of the pricing conversation. To me is why it matters to me. Obviously, it's my job and if I'm terrible at it, then I'm going to have problems, but I'm genuinely intellectually stimulated and kind of fascinated by the different aspects of it, so that's why pricing matters to me.
Aurelia Spivey
Welcome to Pricing Matters, a podcast by Digitory Legal. Digitory is a data analytics and cost management platform and service, bringing data-driven pricing and cost prediction to law. My name is Aurelia Spivey, and I will be your host as we speak to leaders who are making an impact in legal pricing, discuss market trends, and find out from them why pricing matters.
Good morning. Welcome to the Pricing Matters podcast. Our guest this morning is Keith Maziarek. Keith is the Director of Pricing and Legal Project Management at Katten Muchin Rosenman. Keith, good morning, welcome to the podcast.
Keith Maziarek
Good morning, Aurelia. Thank you for inviting me.
Aurelia Spivey
No, you're welcome. I always like to start at the beginning, so I'm hopeful for our listeners to hear a little bit about your background. So tell us a bit about your pricing and project management journey.
Keith Maziarek
Sure. So I got into the field around the time it started being a thing. Around 2009 I was, working at DLA Piper. I was just finishing up my MBA in the evening program at Kellogg, at Northwestern at that time and so I was really looking to kinda leverage what I had learned. And I was working at DLA in a business development role there and our managing partner came to me and he knew I was in school, he knew I was looking for other challenges and adventures, and he said, Hey, look, the industry that we work in is changing and what has worked in the past isn't going to work in the future and I want to make sure that we are positioned to be as competitive and responsive to what clients' new needs are going to be. Do you want to help me and co-found a task force internally on alternative billing arrangements and all of the various sort of disciplines that support what the new business model is going to be? And of course, looking for something new and exciting, I was like, absolutely. So I jumped on it and then over the next couple of years, it became more and more of my day. It wasn't my official job, but it was something I really started to dig into, and then it became more and more a part of my share of my work. And 2011 firm decided they wanted to make that an official function. So I was able to position myself to be the first person that was charged with formally developing and launching the pricing and legal project management functions at DLA Piper. That was for the America's practice, just cause of the version structure. So, I dealt a lot with the global team out of the UK and Hong Kong. We were pretty much a unit together, but that was kind of the structure. I was there for 10 years and really learned a lot. Really enjoyed it, and I've enjoyed it ever since. I spent a little time at Perkins Coie after that as one of the, I was the senior director of Client Value, which was one of the first client value roles I would say there with that particular title.
Then Katten was looking to transform their firm. They wanted to modernize and they came knocking and it sounded like a great opportunity. I liked all the people and uh, so I jumped over to Katten. So that's kind of, and I've been here two years now almost. So that's in a nutshell how I got here.
Aurelia Spivey
Thanks for sharing that. I think a story that I hear often on the podcast in this role is that sort of evolution of the role at a firm and having worked there for a time, you have the trust to be able to move into a role like this, and as we know, there are a lot more roles now than there were a few years ago, so that's great.
Keith Maziarek
I am lucky that I was there when it sort of started because what I learned was, I was, one of the things that I was afraid of at the beginning was, what if I do something wrong and kind of an imposter syndrome sort of thing.
Aurelia Spivey
Yeah
Keith Maziarek
But because there was no definition of what was right back then, I eventually came to realize like, I could try anything, but nobody knows for sure what works great and what doesn't. I almost feel like I was lucky that it happened at that time because there was no sort of bar to try and measure up to. Right? We got to make it up as we go, which makes it, that's kinda what makes it fun, is when you can get creative and try new things and sometimes they work and you gotta latch onto those and try and highlight those and make people forget about the things you try that aren't maybe is if others, but anyway, I was lucky. I was happy to be there when I was and I was happy to be given the opportunities.
Aurelia Spivey
Nice mix of that circumstance and being able to make it happen. Now I know you write, you write articles and speak on this topic. So, I was doing some research for the interview and I came across an article that you wrote for Law 360, which I thought was very interesting, the title is Clients Benefit from Law Firm Expense Growth. Now I think that's a great title, but I also think it's counterintuitive. So, I'd love for you to share some examples that you've seen how this growth and expense actually benefit clients. Because I think it's a good article and you've got some good thoughts on that.
Keith Maziarek
Well, first of all, thanks for reading the article. The genesis of that article was, I deal pretty frequently with clients directly, and also sometimes through the partners I get tied into what the conversations are and the ones that I'm not directly involved in myself and what you hear, what I had been hearing or have been hearing quite frequently is a relatively common refrain from many clients. No, I won't say many, but it happened enough where it wasn't just a one-off kind of thing, it was a pattern. When you hear from them, there's no reason that you should raise your prices any more than the cost of the national inflation rate every year. Like, there's absolutely no reason that any law firm should raise their rates any more than that. And I took issue with that because, I kind of deconstructed what the topic was and, the point of it was that national inflation, the basis of my argument was national inflation is a function of a basket of goods that they use to calculate CPI off, right? Consumer price index, that basket of goods is mostly consumer goods that are like staples for just sustaining life. So it's like the representative goods are like a dozen eggs and like a gallon of milk and a gallon of gasoline, that kind of thing. The observation that I took from that was a gallon of milk or a dozen eggs, all those things are produced at an extremely massive scale. There are tried and true processes that are executed exactly the same every and it's more of a commoditized industry, right? Where its price equals marginal cost. There's no, they're sort of operating, not necessarily at any sort of a premium because it's literally a perfect competition type of industry.
If you juxtapose that with anything that's a more sophisticated good product or good or service, there are different dynamics to the cost basis that go into producing that. And in particular what I'm referring to is there's a market for everything, right? There's a market for talent, there's a market for any sort of service that meets the level of needs that you have from a level of sophistication or complexity standpoint. And that can vary as you go up the complexity spectrum from what it takes to produce something that's much more commoditized and highly massive scale like a gallon of milk. So that is where legal services, particularly high-end premium legal services, fall on that higher end of the complexity spectrum.
So all that basis, put in place things like if we don't pay our lawyers, the market rate what lawyers of particular skill sets are getting. We won't have those lawyers to do the work anymore, so we won't be able to be competitive in terms of being able to retain work and do good work for the clients that we as a firm, and any firm, sort of targets as their strategic focus for where they want to be placed in the market. So, if we don't spend money on salaries, and I understand there are different opinions on what the appropriate salary is for different types of lawyers, if we don't pay it we can't have those people here at the firm. And if we do pay it to have those people here at the firm to serve our clients, then obviously we have to set a price point that is higher than what we have to pay to have them here. Or again, you would be upside down, you'd be losing money. So it was that sort of basis that I extrapolated out across a couple of other things. Salaries are the big thing. You have to have people here that can do the work and if they can walk across the street and get what the market rate is, you can't pay them 10% less and expect them to stick around. That's just sort of the nature of doing business, and that's the same with every other industry. So, whether it's talent or it's input as far as actual tangible inputs that go into building to make consumer goods or whatever you might use as an example.
Other things, like if we didn't spend money on software and computers that were number one safe for retaining data from our clients, like confidential data. And number two worked so that people could be efficient in doing their work, then we wouldn't be very competitive and the work product we turned out would be slow and it would be imprecise and it wouldn't be very good and we would have a risk for security issues, like data security issues. So all these things cost money and if you want to hire a firm to do this, not only have table stakes where they have a person there that knows something about the law, but they have very specialized experience and they have the tools and people and systems in place in order to do really a top-notch job, that costs money, and, it's more than what it costs to, the increase in those cost year every year is more than what the cost increases are for consumer staples. So, in a nutshell, that was the point I was making in that article and because I had heard it enough, it was one of those things where I'm like, you know what I'm going to, I want to get something out there. I'm going to put something out there just because I started developing the idea and I was like I'm going to write this. It was something I was inspired to write versus something I was asked to write. And it was interesting. It was fun to go through.
Aurelia Spivey
It's a great conceptual piece, I love that. So going back to the same article, another line that sort of struck me and I think it's going to be interesting as a sort of starter for the rest of our conversation was, you said in these dynamic times the conversation should revolve around evolving how legal work is structured, executed, and optimized. So I'd love to, dig a little bit more into those elements of structure, execution, and optimization. Tell us how you define them and what you were thinking when you were writing that piece.
Keith Maziarek
Yeah sure. So what I was thinking around that particular point was that, again, going back to a lot of the client conversations of what you see as patterns, there's a massive emphasis on I need the cheapest rate and the highest discount for every person or every category of person you might put on this because I just need the cheapest rate. And if you're talking about hourly billable work, a rate is just an input cost that is set with absolutely no reference point for how many units of input you're going to buy at that rate, right? So if you want to get the cheapest rates that are going to foreclose on some of the opportunities for the talent you're going to use because they just can't do it at that rate. Whereas you might have somebody that has a higher hourly billing rate, but bills 20% less hours than the person with a lower billing rate, and you end up spending more money on the cheaper rate person, right? So there's this tendency to ignore what the two components of fees are and just focus on the one that is easiest to control, which you can say, I can grind the rate down into the ground, but that may not actually save you any money. And at the end of the day, if you're going to set really low rates, you're more likely to get the people that are not as specialized with the same level of tune skills as the higher rate person and that may a lot of times it's got unintended negative consequences to what the goal was at the end of the day. So that was the basis, of where I was getting to, with focusing more on what is the, I use a lot of analogies which you'll probably hear more before we're done talking here today, but like, what's the recipe for the work to be done? Right? Like if you had to create a blueprint for how this is going to happen, that's where you control how many units of time you buy as opposing the chart controlling just the price you pay for every unit. Because that's where I was saying there's a trade-off there, right?
So the structured, execution, and optimization elements that I brought up were how do you structure the work in terms of what is that sort of recipe or blueprint for what needs to be done for any particular matter, portfolio matters, or what have you. So things like, what kind of team members are you going to use, how are you going to engage them? Are there other elements of production you can enlist in the process as well?
Technology, sometimes you'll have third-party partners that you can bring in to do pieces of the work from an unbundling or disaggregation standpoint, a little bit cheaper. So that's really like, how do you structure this in a way that seems to be most efficient and still be able to maintain the level of quality that's required, given the complexity?
So that's sort of the structure part. Execution is okay, as you've created this sort of blueprint you need to follow in order to realize the outcomes or the goals that you have from a financial standpoint, or from a deliverable standpoint, or a timeline standpoint, whatever the KPIs might be, you have to now live what you planned. Which starting out, a lot of people wanted to just get the right price. So they would put together a structure that was cheap and then they would do work in a very expensive way, and they couldn't figure out why they weren't profitable. So it really is important to make sure that you structure their deal right, and follow the plan that you've put together. And then optimization happens in the process, where you can say, Hey, you know what, we can give this work to a paralegal as opposed to a second-year associate because we can get 80% of what the second-year associate was getting done with a paralegal who's cheaper. There's going to be no quality erosion there and it'll save the client money and it'll get us done in the same amount of time or whatever. So that kinda optimization or we've done 30 of these deals now, or 30 of these specific matters, could we use this document review software now to kind of take a piece of the work out of what the manual labor has gotta be and move it to something that's got a much lower cost of production, but the same level of consistency and quality and output. That's kind of the optimization part and to me, I always like to think of that in a continuous improvement sort of cycle where ever so often, whether it's when you finish any one given matter or project or on an annual basis, say, Hey, what opportunities do we have we identified, now that we've been doing this for a while, to try and raise our game a little bit and get a little bit smarter, work smarter not harder kind of approach, to doing this work on the client's behalf and still making sure they're satisfied with what's happening.
Aurelia Spivey
Thank you for sharing that. It gives us some insight into how your team is working and I want to come back to talk about your team and the practicing and legal project management aspect and skill set a little bit later but first I wanted to dig into a little bit more about scoping and pricing and talk about trends and lawyer engagement. So, I'd love to find out from you, sometimes lawyer engagement can still be a challenge in the pricing process. So, how do you get your lawyers to engage with your team in scoping and pricing, from the outset of as many matters as possible?
Keith Maziarek
Usually, what I've done or the first kind of approach I take is there's just sort of a logical justification for going through a scoping exercise. And if you've been asked to provide a budget or a fixed fee of any kind, what would your approach be to this matter? There's an understandable and rational amount of diligence that you want to put into explaining what your approach is and ultimately that goes to support what the pricing strategy is for that particular matter. It's helpful to the client to see what they're getting, but it's a really helpful exercise internally to the person on the service delivery side who's going to be leading the work to be done, to think through every piece of it and understand and anticipate, okay, well you know what, based on this particular condition that's in place, we're probably going to have to do these three things. And you know what? Last time we did that, we used these people, but we have a new person now we could do it this way. Or again, maybe there's a technology component you could integrate into the process. So trying to just appeal to the rational side of given that sort of logic say, look, if we're going to be asked to give a number, to the client, to do this project, wouldn't you want to know what it is you're buying for that number? Because there's often a lot of misalignment and expectations or understanding between two sides if you don't reconcile what their expectations are and what your expectations are based on your experience so that you come to an agreement and then the price has much more rational context.
Otherwise, if they say, Hey, we've got, I'll give you an example. This happened a long time ago and you don't see this kind of thing happen as often anymore, but a long time ago I was asked by one of our partners to submit a bid for a fixed fee for every litigation matter they have that would come along. So it was every matter, every time they had a commercial litigation matter filed against them, what will we charge them to defend them in that matter? And so I went to the partner, I said, what kind of litigation is this? Employment litigation? Is this contracts? Is this breach? Do you know what are we talking about? And she said they didn't say. And I said, okay, so is this high stakes, is this high volume, is this low volume, you know what, give me something. And she was like, they didn't say. And I said, all right, look, the problem with this exercise is if they didn't tell us any of these things and they're not willing to share that, they're not going to get much useful information out of it because the numbers are all going to be across the board. But given that, because we're going to have to give them a number, we have to tell them what we're selling them for that number, because they didn't tell us what they're asking to buy for that number. So basically we put together, okay, here's sort of a generic contract dispute, a commercial contract breach of a contract claim for someone in this line of business, and here's what the components we're assuming would be, and here's the price. So, that kind of makes sense rationally, Lawyers are very logical, rational people, so you want to, it's kind of easy to make the case, like we have to tell them what we're selling them for, the price we're giving them, as opposed just throwing a price out there because you can see where there might be disconnects in what the expectations are on both sides. So that usually helps and also using examples of, Hey, here's a similar scenario that we did before, we put together this budget based on this assumption. That helps overcome any sort of reluctance that they may have. Like, ah, what's the point? Is there any value in doing this? Whatever. When they can see that it's worked before that kind of helps encourage them to engage in the process. And once they've done it, there's usually, even if you have to do a little more arm twisting than you'd want to get them to do it once. There's usually a lot easier path to get them to do it in the future because they'll recognize sort of the value of doing it and even better if they get positive reinforcement from the client saying, Hey, you guys did a great job at defining the scope, and I understand now what all the levers are. By the way, I think we need to change these one or two things that you had in assumptions and we can make some adjustments and the price from that. I think it just helps to reinforce the value of it and then you get a lot more people that are converting at that point. So, usually, those things work, and sometimes nothing works, but usually, those things are relatively compelling.
Aurelia Spivey
I love the line, I hope this has said that you have to tell them what you're selling them. I think it's a great line because it really articulates what you're trying to do in the scoping process. The piece about the positive reinforcement from the client brings me to the next question is, your first example, and I know you said that was a long time ago, was where the client really was giving you nothing, but with clients, there's a lot more collaboration now, so I'd love to know how you're able to engage with clients in the pricing process, at this time as opposed to at that time when you had that particular example.
Keith Maziarek
Sure and things have evolved a lot. So I think just the sort of the pricing and LPM and process improvement and practice management. All these business-oriented disciplines have evolved on the law firm side. It's the client side, after that example that I gave you, which again was a while back, and you'll see through any number of observations throughout the market, the momentum that has been gained on the legal operations side, that has really sort of, I would say evolved a communication channel or a collaboration channel that is very well aligned with folks like myself and then some of the related disciplines for getting a lot of these things done. And sometimes it's a matter of, I'd say most often I'm engaged with legal operations people. During negotiations or renegotiations type processes, those kinds of things. Also when you've got institutional client relationships, a lot of them want ongoing analytics and insights into what the nature of, and the evolution of the work is and the composition of the portfolio work you may be doing.
So a lot of those conversations are had between business professionals rather than legal service delivery people, my partners, and what have you. So that's a big way in which we'll engage with those people and those are really productive conversations because it's like you speak the same language. If an in-house lawyer calls me and asks what their risk exposure might be for a certain contract clause is, I'm not going to be able to speak the same language to them as one of our corporate lawyers would be. It's the same principle, right? So, that has become more and more a big component of the client interface, the sort of opportunity that I've engaged in most often.
Aurelia Spivey
So you mentioned obviously providing some analytics and insights on portfolio matters. I'd love to talk a little bit more about data and how you are leveraging data to increase the precision around pricing. And an added question to that is, what are the greatest challenges that you're seeing and how are you and your team overcoming them?
Keith Maziarek
I look at the pricing exercise as being a multidimensional thing and there's a place in it for referencing past matter data from similar matters, but then you don't want to necessarily work under the assumption that was perfect or that those scoping elements were exactly the same, but it's a good reference point. So looking at that and then overlaying that with contextual information based on what the sort of unique characteristics are of the matter or portfolio at hand and you make some modifications to what the data would tell you from the historical matters. So that's how we're using it and a lot of times we'll use that with, I'll use that with clients, and what's a really compelling case is when you can use it with clients on reflecting data from their specific matters. Because a lot of times one of the things you'll learn as you go through this and explore the way different clients have their operations, their team set up, or what they're collecting or not collecting from a data standpoint. It's a very inaccurate assumption to assume that the data that we have or that we look at or that we capture will accurately or directly mirror what maybe the corresponding data points are meant to mirror, that are being collected on the client side.
A lot of times you can use that data to reconcile what the understanding or expectations are between the law firm and the client, across some of that historical matter data or whatever. So, that's an important thing to keep in mind is that, using the data that you have, and particularly with a specific client, is often very a great basis for coming to an agreement and taking a lot of the friction out of the pricing or operations aspect of the relationship.
To your second point, one of the challenges, the biggest challenges, I would say in leveraging data in at least in a law firm context, and I don't know a lot of our client counterparts experience the same challenge, is really the integrity of the data, the integrity and the breadth of data to which you have access to use and to try and develop in to. The reason for that is, at least for sure on the law firm side, I think this is probably similar on the corporate legal department side, is that there has historically not been much I would say, discipline or diligence in a sort of careful documentation and capture of things that are meaningful and understanding scope and the corresponding complexity and pricing elements of the scope for any given piece of work. I know on the law firm side it's because it takes time. Time is money. People are always urged to the bill. The biggest opportunity for collecting a lot of data, or one of the best opportunities is at intake, at the matter open, and then at the other one is at matter closed. Because you can reconcile differences, but a new matter opens and a partner goes, I just gotta get billing on this, so click a couple of these boxes, what's going to get me, they know how to game the system to get through it quickly because they didn't have really an appreciation or an understanding or anybody that was going to try and leverage that data later for their benefit.
I think you see that changing a lot now but we're sort of stuck with some of those legacy effects of just not having the same level of discipline or diligence around collecting good, accurate data that then can be leveraged later. And we're working on that. There's a lot of things we're doing now as far as data capture, a lot of tools that are coming out trying to extract insights out of what sort of the contextual information is from time entries and that kind of thing, whatever. So we're working on, their efforts across different parts of the industry to try and cover up the, or I would say leverage what you can from the past, despite some of these challenges, and also position yourself more strategically in the future, but those things are ongoing. It's all, I always say, it's all, it's evolution, not revolution. So we're getting a lot better, but you can't just flip the switch and say, okay, now we're going to start using data and it's going to be perfect. There are a lot of things you have to put in place in order to facilitate that.
Aurelia Spivey
Thank you for sharing that and I couldn't agree more in terms of, I wrote down, the integrity and breadth of data that there is at law firms and obviously that's one of the things that we are trying to solve as well. So, it's going to be an interesting next decade, and talking about that, I wanted to ask you, this is the big question. If you're a crystal ball, what pricing trends do you foresee in the next decade?
Keith Maziarek
I mean, I think what we've seen over the last decade is obviously an increasing importance on the ambiguous topic of value. So not only what are you charging me but what am I getting for what I'm paying, sort of thing, right? I think that given a lot of the, again, I'll call it an evolution analogy, the evolutionary development in a lot of the software that's out there. The tools as well as some of the impact that data specialists, like data scientists are having on how those tools can be leveraged to generate the best and highest level of accuracy in terms of insights and understand what some of the core driving factors are and what the biggest risk factors are in certain types of work. And being able to measure and then articulate those to clients. I feel like that is only going to continue to increase and improve and there is going to also be an improved, continuous improvement in the way that that data is understood and consumed on the client side. So, again, I mentioned a lot of the rise of the ops and the business people, the real sort of technicians from a business standpoint.
On the client side that are much more versed in data and much more versed in metrics and understanding risk and those kinds of things. As that sophistication level on both sides continues to grow, I think that the conversations will again, still continue to gradually evolve to a higher state where we're not saying, okay, I need a 20% discount on these rates all the time. And it's, you're sort of having that very sort of base-level conversation. I think it's going to become a bigger, a higher level conversation, that's going to be very business case-oriented and business case based using a lot more numbers and then people that know how to contextualize those numbers for their specific goals. So I think it'll be those kinds of things and also, one of the things I've heard a lot about, and we've, I've seen it a little bit more, but I understand there's a bigger appetite than is being satisfied right now in the industry on the client side is sort of like annual retainers for a cross-section of a bunch of different work. So rather than saying, we'll do all your patent litigation work based on these things, and these assumptions for X amount per year, it's more like the, almost like the outside general council model, where you get a bundled set of services for X amount per year and then it's just up to the law firm to say, okay, can we manage. Can we manage scope based on what the assumption is and manage the work to make that profitable? But again, that'll all be enabled by data and also by ways of putting efficient staffing models together, and then optimizing that over time, and then the integration of technology.
So it's sort of a process flow that I think is continuing to improve over time and I think that we'll see that going on more and more as some of these data tools are adopted. Also, I think there's a generational issue with that where younger people that are coming into the profession and sort of proceeding up the ranks now, they have sort of a greater importance on getting something done quickly and without wasting time, and I think that's a priority for them. So it's not so much about pressing it, it's more about proactively sort of effective and efficient, and I think we'll see that playing into the, into the process as well.
Aurelia Spivey
So that's really helpful and it brings me really nicely to where I wanted to sort of end our conversation, which is around the pricing and legal project management teams and the skill set because what I'm hearing from that is process improvement and a mix of technology. So these teams are going to be more and more important to be able to fulfill those client needs, in the next decade. At the moment the teams are pretty small, with two to three people according to the peer monitor survey. I mean that's the average size of the team. I'd love it if you were able to tell us a little bit more about your team at Katten and also in that two to three-people range, what should they be prioritizing to be successful in this next decade as we see the pricing evolve?
Keith Maziarek
Sure. So the two to three is interesting because if you take an average, I think I was just thinking about that number. There's the average team size is smaller, but I bet the average, I bet the presence of a team is much more prevalent now than it was five or 10 years. So a lot of firms have two people, but 10 years ago or five years ago, they had nobody. Right. So I bet that average is dragged down by the ones that have, that was sort of late adopters and are digging their toes in now, but I feel like that's probably growing so. But here at Katten, so, we, as I mentioned, when they came to recruit me, they said, we're looking to transform our firm in so many ways, and we want it to be the firm of the future, and there's, we've identified a lot of strategic areas where we have to develop that. That being said, when I got here, they didn't say, go hire an army of people and see what you can do with them. There was sort of a process of, let's validate that there's an appetite internally, and then there's going to be adoption for what you're doing, and then once we identify the kind of what the trajectory of that is, we'll give you the team members you need in order to serve what the demand is. Which to me it's a pretty measured and logical way of going about it.
So we started with pricing and it's funny because when I started in this area back in, like I said about 10, 11 years ago, 12 years ago whatever it was, everybody wanted to know how they could get to a price with their client that their client would like and that what their client would buy. And then they didn't really care too much about how they delivered on what the assumptions were to meet that price. So what that really, what that sort of formed was this lagging effect where I said, Hey, you know, we set up this, the partner would come to me and they'd say, well, we need to, my client's asking for a fixed fear, they want this or that pricing wise. And we go through the exercise of setting up assumptions and coming to a price we thought was good and the client would accept it and they would come back to me, the partner, and say, Hey, thanks so much, they bought, they took our bid, we're going to do the work, this is awesome. And I said, okay, well now we have to make sure we're doing some monitoring of that work so that you comply with the assumptions we put in place as far as staffing and what you're going to do and what you're not going to do, or else that pricing thing is going to a come back to bite you. And I'd always get the Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever let me get going on the matter and I'll come back to you in like a month and we'll do all that stuff. And of course, they never would. They would just go do whatever they would normally do and then the next year would come up or whatever that matter concluded or that portfolio, whatever it might have been, and they'd say, wow, I really got killed on this thing. I said, well, let's look at why that is. And you'd go look, and all they did was do the work exactly the way that they've always done it, not consistent with the plan we put together. So, the reason I tell that whole story is what kind of started here was, I observed the same pattern where people had more of an interest on the front end of understanding how they could price themselves to get the work. We focused a lot of our recruiting or a lot of our efforts in terms of trying to build momentum and recognition and credibility internally on the pricing side because I knew that was where we were going to get traction and then the LPM side of things would be a little bit more of a lagging, a point in the process or step to take because that's what they would adopt that second. So I didn't want to build it all at once and then have sort of that kind of clumsy implementation side.
So, it started with just me and I quickly got overwhelmed and upper management was very observant of that and was very visible and they're like, Hey, what do you need? And I said I need somebody that can do a lot more of the building of models and analytics because I have to do a lot of talking all day now and I can't do both. At least not if I ever sleep, and I still wouldn't get it all done. So, they said, okay, go get who you need and I got somebody that I used to work with, I was able to lure her over and she's a, a senior analyst. I actually just promoted her to manager. She's an incredibly talented person who knows data modeling, who understands accounting principles, who understands financial systems, and all these things. So she's really a huge asset to my team because she can do a lot of different things, not only for me but for a lot of the partners without my help and some of the other departments internally as well. So that was my second hire. Then from there, we said, okay, well, she's pretty advanced in her skills and I had her doing much more routine work, as well as the complex work, and there was way too much complex work. And I said, well, the next person I need is somebody that can do some of the more, the more commoner routine work in terms of dealing with rate sets and some of these other things. So then we got a junior analyst, who's doing some great work for us now as well and has taken some of the pressure off of the senior analyst who's now a manager. So those things were going along and then the time came and we said, all right, well, are we at a point in our evolution now where we should be looking? Who should we be looking at next? So I had a conversation with our COO, actually, my boss did first, and then we talked about it. The three of us talked about it and we determined it was time to get, started building up the LPM side of things, which made sense from a timing standpoint about a year and a year and a half in. So, that was our next hire and that's, we hired a senior legal project manager, who was a former practicing lawyer, very accomplished, worked for some really great firms with great reputations, had a lot of results she could point to instead of just saying, I did budgets for it, it was like, we saved this much money on this portfolio, this was a fixed fee, we did this, whatever. So, I was very excited to get her on board. As a lawyer, she can speak to and talk the talk with, and that pretty quickly gets credibility with the partners we work with. So that's kind of how our team structure stands now and we'll see what happens next. We're a team of four and we are getting a lot done, but it's interesting because every team member you add, every time you add capacity, for some reason we keep increasing the amount of demand that we get too. So, and I think what I've just explained sort of mirrors a lot of what many of the teams are doing across some of the other firms that have had a pretty strong adoption of what the value we can bring to the operations are.
Aurelia Spivey
So it's sort of digging really deep into the pricing and analytics piece first and getting that trust with the partners and then being able to build on that second piece of project management, once you've established that, seems to be the approach that you've taken and from hearing from some of your accounting parts as well. So I have one last question, Keith. I'd like to end on this question and we're on the Pricing Matters podcast. So tell me why does pricing matter to you?
Keith Maziarek
Why does it matter to me? To me, it's kind of a fascinating discipline because it is a unique communication medium between buyer and seller. It's a multifaceted sort of topic. It's always interesting to me to see what the perceptions and expectations are on the buyer and seller side and try and figure out how you navigate that territory, to come to a mutually beneficial and agreeable sort of agreement. You know, come to a place where both sides are happy. One of the really fascinating parts to me is the psychology of the pricing conversation and I think there are a lot of sort of principles that you can learn about psychology and pricing and everything, and there's been a lot of study over the years on sort of marketing and positioning and messaging and all those kind of things and that can impact pricing. But for being a practitioner, that day to day sees multiple examples on a daily basis and a weekly basis, how the psychological impressions or signals that are sent through sort of the pricing conversation. To me is why it matters to me. Obviously, it's my job and if I'm terrible at it, then I'm going to have problems, but I'm genuinely intellectually stimulated and kind of fascinated by the different aspects of it, so that's why pricing matters to me. It matters to my employer for different reasons, but it matters to me for those reasons.
Aurelia Spivey
Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming on today. This has been a great conversation and I look forward to sharing it with our listeners.
Keith Maziarek
Brevity is not one of my virtues and I'm working on that. But I always enjoy the opportunity to kind of think about what it is I do, and I'm happy to share however I can. So thank you so much for the invitation.
Aurelia Spivey
Thank you for listening to Pricing Matters, a podcast Digitory Legal. To find out more about our guests please visit our podcast page. If you have any feedback or guests that you think we should feature, please reach out to me. Thank you for listening, see you next time.
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