Originally recorded on the Pricing Matters Podcast by Digitory Legal. Digitory Legal is now part of BigHand. Learn more here.

Aurelia Spivey, Marketing Consultant with BigHand, chats with Melissa Prince, Chief Client Value and Innovation Officer at Ballard Spahr, and Dan Pope, Director of Strategic Pricing & Profitability at Ballard Spahr.

Melissa sits on the firm's Management Committee and Expanded Board. Melissa focuses on listening to client needs and understanding how each client's business operates in order to make the connection between value and innovation. She oversees the firm's Client Value and Innovation program, which includes more than 20 business professionals focused on creating a customized experience for each client.

Melissa is a frequent speaker, presenter, and author on legal operations topics. She recently launched the Ballard360 Insider blog, which is focused on delivering insights and best practices in legal operations. Under Melissa's leadership, the firm was named to the Financial Times' Most Innovative Law Firms Business of Law, an innovation "Mover and Shaker" by BTI Consulting, and a finalist for the American Lawyer Industry Awards in the best law firm/client team and best business team categories.

Before coming to Ballard Spahr, Melissa held similar roles at two Am Law 25 firms. She is an attorney who, before leaving private practice, managed complex commercial litigation matters. She is a Six Sigma Green Belt, Certified Legal Project Manager, ALPP and ALPM.

Dan Pope oversees a team of pricing professionals that focus on using state-of-the-art tools and technology to gather and analyze information and evaluate the variables that drive cost.

The team partners with firm clients to develop accurate cost-projections, customize pricing and value-based fee arrangements, establish goals and expectations, and identify preferences for cost efficiency, predictability, transparency, and value.

Dan also leads an ongoing initiative to review the firm’s top clients to ensure firm profitability benchmarks are met. The program focuses on current arrangements, staffing, and overall economic health of the engagements.

Top three takeaways from this episode

• Innovation Philosophy: There is no innovation without adoption! When a new approach isn’t working, you need to be able to fail fast and rethink what you are doing. 

• Competitive Intelligence: It's about giving clients something that they cannot find elsewhere. 

• Regulating the Legal Industry: Change is coming and Law firms need to think more quickly and innovatively about how they are operating.

Ssoft skills are the most important parts of these jobs. He's right, that you can come from a variety of different backgrounds and excel in these roles, but you have to be also willing to.

Podcast Transcript:

Melissa Prince 
It makes the difference in terms of long-lasting partnerships, which is really what we care about. We are constantly looking at team structure and making sure that the team is diverse and we're making sure that we're giving the best available pricing options to the client. So, that's why it matters because it's the starting place for everything.

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.

Welcome to the Pricing Matters podcast. Our guests this morning are Melissa prince who is the Chief Client Value and Innovation Officer at Ballard Spahr. And Daniel Pope, who is the Director of Strategic Pricing & Profitability at Ballard Spahr. Good morning. Welcome to the podcast.

Melissa Prince 
Good morning. Thank you so much for having us.

Aurelia Spivey 
So, it's always really helpful for our listeners to hear a little bit about your background and your journey into this legal pricing and innovation world. So, Melissa, would you like to share with us?

Melissa Prince 
Sure. So, my background is as a lawyer and I practice commercial litigation for about 10 years before transitioning to the business side of the law. I have now been on the business side for almost just as long as I was on the practice side. I feel like you know, having the law firm practice experience has been really helpful in my current role, but I've also had to focus much more on learning the business skills related to pricing and profitability and just how to overall manage a law firm, over the years. And so it's really a mix, I think this skill set that has been required has really been a good mix. I transitioned out and my first role outside of the practice was as a legal project manager. I then, and I was at a larger firm, I spent a couple of years and another larger firm where I was focused on a client value team, very similar to the one that we have at Ballard. And I was on the pricing and legal project management team there. Then I had the opportunity to come to Ballard Spahr. I've been here approximately five years, and Dan and I kind of created the program together. Really started at the same time five years ago and we were both relatively new to the roles when we started our program, which is the client value and innovation program. It started with about, it started with just two of us, then we went to a team of about five, and now we're a team of about 25 people. Over the past five years, our program and our department has really exploded. We're in charge of the overall client value side of things at the firm, which involves legal pricing, legal project management, client technology, data analytics, and data management. And now and then now also knowledge management and competitive intelligence. 

Aurelia Spivey 
Melissa, thanks so much for sharing that, that is incredibly interesting, and we're going to delve a lot more into your team at that at Ballard Spahr and your innovation and what that means. But it would be great to hear from Dan, in terms of your journey and that connection with Melissa. So tell us about that.

Dan Pope 
I started with a pretty small firm, I think there were like 40 partners, and it was really just coming out of college and I kind of worked in finance for smaller firms. So that didn't mean just doing a job. It was nice that I kind of got to see, really all the kind of aspects of how a firm works, and then I got the opportunity to go from a small firm to an extremely big firm, a top 15 firm, where it was kind of the opposite. Instead of being able to do a little bit of everything. Everyone was focused and I was in that firm for a couple of years and then the opportunity came up. And I got to really see how it was done from a firm that had these pricing and these project operations teams there for a long time, which was both, there were some things that you kind of saw where you thought, Oh, that was great, I wouldn't have thought about it that way. And then, with the same thing being said, there are some other things where you kind of saw how it was, and we thought maybe if it was a different situation with a little more change, I wouldn't do it that way. So that was actually perfect, when then, again going back to 2015, when both of us kind of got this chance, because Ballard didn't have a program. They had a program, but it had only been around for a couple of years. So both of us kind of got to take each of our experiences, the things we've seen, the things we thought worked well, and the things that we would have changed.

Aurelia Spivey 
So on that note, I'd love to talk more about innovation, which is part of your program. Specifically, what does innovation mean, at Ballard Spahr?

Dan Pope 
You know, I think it's important to just kind of notice at this time, that there are so many firms out there that, especially here in Philadelphia, we have a lot of firms that we compete with. And I assume when we are sending in an RFP and a proposal, there are a lot of the exact same firms. And if it's a fixed fee or discounted rates, we're all kind of there. One firm's price points could be a bit higher than the other. But, all of us have teams of attorneys that are very smart and they have their expertise. So really where I view innovation, is if everyone does have the experience, everyone's going to come in with a solid team, then it's just all right now, how can Ballard propose something, include something, add on to our proposal, our pitch, that really does help us there. From a pricing side of this, we just started to look at instead of just giving one option, how can we include more. So that might be, step one pricing actually giving three or four, giving real details, and explaining the thought process that kind of went into our pitches. If there's one pricing arrangement or approach that we think is best, obviously, commenting on that and say, based on the scope of work we have, or was saying, yeah, we think we could do something else, such as a fixed fee to give you cost certainty. But the scope of work still is vague, so it helps to have a conversation. So I guess to answer your question, it's our process, as it looks today looks completely different than it did in 2015. Our process and how we tackle things internally, how we work with our partners, we have various computer programs and tools, some that we build in-house some that we get through third-party vendors, that we have now. So, it's looking at the way that, I think about innovation is looking at our current process, how it applies to pricing and then each day, if there's something out there if we're capturing data better, can we use more of our historical both client-facing and internal data. Such that when we price the same type of work or maybe the second or third deal for the same client if there's anything else we can use that we've been gathering to either make the price point better or newer. So that our team, instead of where if a deal could have cost us x the first time, now that we have more templates, more computer programs, and the ability to pass information back and forth easier so that our pricing can get more competitive.

Melissa Prince 
From an overarching perspective, there is a ton of focus on the word innovation in the legal industry. And our perspective on innovation is that it's, it doesn't necessarily require technology to be involved. I think that innovation focused recently, we've seen it in the news, and we hear it from all sorts of vendors in the legal industry, about how technology is taking place and is being developed that will support what law firms are trying to do, in terms of providing value to our clients. But for us, it's really about making small improvements to the practice of law that results in lawyers delivering better value and that can be through increased efficiency, through better client service, or through increased cost-effectiveness, and that may involve technology, but in some cases, it may not. The thing that I think about all the time is that there is no innovation if there's no adoption. That means that if we're trying to roll out the technology, for example, where the partners and our clients are just not willing to adopt or implement that technology, then that is not a solution that's kind of scratch and rethink what we're doing. And so we talk a lot about failing fast and we talk a lot about, if things are not working, fixing the things that aren't working so that we can try to get buy-in and adoption. A lot of times that involves talking about the process that we have first that we want to change, and then using technology if we can, to change and improve that process and to get people to buy into what we're trying to do.

Aurelia Spivey 
I love that phrase if there's no innovation if there's no adoption. I think that's a fantastic way to look at it because I've been in a lot of firms, testing out a lot of programs and if the partners and the lawyers aren't working with you and making those changes, it is just a lot of technology that's sitting on a virtual shelf. One of the other pieces that you mentioned Melissa, is that innovation is small improvements that result in delivering better value. I think that brings us really nicely on to the next question I have, which is also around this concept of value. Another thing that we are hearing a lot about on all of the various legal channels that I listened to and read about. So can you tell us what value means at Ballard Spahr?

Melissa Prince
Yeah, I think that's a great question because I think value means different things to different clients. If you ask clients, the majority of the clients are going to say that value means being more cost-effective. But for some clients, value is centered around providing excellent client service. For some clients, it is focused on increased efficiency or a focus on improving some of our processes. For some clients, it's simple things that we can be doing, like providing free training and CLEs. Or having client interviews after we bring in new engagements and we complete them to see if the firm is doing a good job and the things that we need to improve and the things that we're doing really well. We have this client value program that's really focused on the tenants of what I think, what we think clients consider to be valuable, the pricing, the matter management, and the technology stuff, but we generally talk about delivering value to our clients from a client value perspective that involves multiple and if not all aspects of our legal and our administrative teams at Ballard. Because it's about listening to what clients want, then figuring out how to meet the needs of the clients, and providing a very individualized approach. It's no longer acceptable to do quality legal work on the client side, law firms are treated as vendors, and so you have to do more than just do that because it's table stakes now to provide quality legal work. So, it's constantly thinking about what clients want and needs and figuring out how you can develop really long-lasting deep partnerships with clients that are focused on the things that we just talked about

Dan Pope 
The term value for a client, when you talk to them, if you say can you please tell me the top three, top five things they value? The answers you get from one client could be focused on specific business needs for them, but it's not to Ballard's benefit and it’s not our strategy to then try to apply all of the same thought processes and then the same value adds to each. And then with that being said, I think it's important, not just because a client has one specific pricing value currently, that you have to just continue to have, when we work with clients, to when we're done projects, to when we're done working with matters to just ask them if what they viewed as their what value was to them was correct in our either product or work product or the way that we handled it. So that if there are any changes for project number two, what they still are considering value adds, is consistent.

Aurelia Spivey 
Absolutely, I like that and it's about that feedback loop. Now, obviously, we're in the middle of the pandemic economic stress. I'd love to hear from you, in terms of the impact that COVID has had in terms of this collaboration in the value and innovation space because it feels like a rich time to be a better partner to your clients.

Melissa Prince 
So, this crisis has been really hard on our client's businesses and it's been really hard on law firms, as well. As we're trying to juggle how to continue to serve the high-quality service that we've always provided while working completely remotely. And as we're sitting here, we're scheduled to reevaluate in January what we're doing in terms of our office space, where I'm located in Philadelphia, but I don't think it's likely that even in January people will be fully back in the office because we have the challenges of working in large cities, where public transportation is going to be an issue and then trying to get up the elevators to get back to our offices is going to be an issue, especially when you're in high floors and you have to continue to social distance, we're not sure about vaccines, and all of that stuff. Starting March 13, I think none of us assumed that we would be away from the office as long as we've been away, and we had to transition to remote work very quickly. And I'm happy to report that from our perspective at the firm, we did it in a much better way than we thought was ever possible. Everybody’s working from home now, and very few of our offices are open. But when we say open, it's like one or two people are back on a floor per office right now and for the most part, we're all working remotely and it's worked really well. But it's required us to really rely heavily on technology. So we click, we use WebEx for all of our conference meeting meetings where you need to see people on video, and we were largely in the past stuck with things like sound path where you couldn't see each other, but when we went remote, we realize the value of seeing each other in person. So there have been a ton of WebEx meetings now and some days I feel like I'm just on WebEx meeting after a WebEx meeting. And the practice groups, the departments are all meeting that way. We're having direct client meetings that way, and it seems much more seamless than we ever thought possible. So from that perspective, it's just little things like that, that has really changed and I don't anticipate that we'll ever go back. And then from an innovation point, well, and I would say that is innovation because the fact that we had to ramp up so quickly and figure out how to make things work from home and to provide value to our clients by using things like WebEx really has made the world of difference. But then there are things that we've been doing and the in terms of some of the technology that we've been building, that's also really largely exploded during COVID, and we've gotten much more buy-in from our attorneys in our firm and from clients, who have realized and recognize the need for technology. So we've done a lot of creative pricing things and then in a couple of instances, we've had to serve as nationwide counsel for large clients where we're managing a high volume of small pieces, where we wanted to better communicate during COVID. So we've had to create client portals that show the tasks that we're managing, which tasks have been completed, and which are still outstanding. The portals have financial information that shows who's doing the work and what the hours and the fees have been on the work to date. And then some of the portals even now have invoices, so that the client can see which invoices have been issued, how the invoices relate to what you're seeing from a financial perspective by matter, and which invoices are still outstanding, and all of that has been fully automated. So, from that perspective, that's been nothing short of amazing. Then there are just some things we're doing to provide value to clients that we're not charging for, that we've been using the technology to do. For example ballardspahr.com, we've been tracking all COVID litigate issues across the United States both at the state and federal level and even in some cases at the local level. Then we've also been tracking certain types of litigation as it's arisen related to COVID and we've been providing that information free of charge to our clients both through ballardspahr.com and through individualized client portals.

Aurelia Spivey 
Thank you, I love that. Some great examples there. So I’m going to take us from collaborating with clients. Obviously, we were on a theme here of innovation through COVID, but I'd like to talk a little bit more about your team, As you said, you went from like five to 25 and you cover the pricing, the LPM, analytics, and knowledge management. So tell us a little bit more about how you will work together to deliver this innovation and client value. 

Melissa Prince 
We actually work, I have five direct reports that cover each of the areas that we identified, pricing, legal project management, client technology, knowledge management, competitive intelligence, and data. We work together pretty seamlessly on most large projects that come into the firm. The benefit of having the team together is that Dan has subject matter expert expertise in the pricing and profitability area. We have a legal project management director who then helps Dan manage things once they come in and figures out ways to develop, with our Director of Client, technology to build dashboard reporting, to support tracking budgets, tracking large matters, helping to figure out from a case management perspective how we're tracking tasks and phases, and really communicating and using that as a mechanism for communicating proactively with clients through live portals that allow them to log in 24/7 and see what's happening. Then we're using a lot from knowledge management and competitive intelligence perspective, where we're now trying to figure out, we have these client portals kind of established where we can figure out how to manage the matters, but how do we add value in terms of giving something to clients from a customer service perspective that they can't find elsewhere. And that's really in this knowledge management competitive intelligence area. 

So what we've been able to do is take, we have an internal, we have a data warehouse, where all of our internal applications flow into where all of the data lives, and then now we're developing API connections with a lot of our third-party vendors, to provide competitive intelligence and knowledge management data that flows into that data warehouse as well. We're able to build some pretty amazing dashboard reporting that's coming out of that, that's part of the portal environment. A lot of what we're doing right now is actually in Microsoft technology through the use of both SharePoint and Power BI and we've had huge success with that. An example of a competitive intelligence database that we recently developed is that we have, we're trying to focus in the private equity spaces on which firms that we should be focused on trying to target from a proposal perspective to say, we'd like to do your work. And we were able to pull all sorts of interesting information from third-party resources that allowed us to see how much dry powder each of the private equity firms has, who is currently doing their work, the types of deals that they've done, and in what space, and in what geographic location, and if the private equity clients are looking to target others to bring in other companies in the spaces in which they're doing work, and they need intelligence on that information. We can also build reports for them, that kind of show them here, say the focus is the Midwest for example and you want to look into fire protection space, and which companies are in that space, and what those companies look like. We can build some pretty sophisticated reports that allow you to drill in and see all of that information. 

Aurelia Spivey 
In terms of skills, obviously, you both have different skills that you've brought to the table and similarly with your team, but what are the most important skills that you think business professionals in law firms should be developing to make them successful?

Dan Pope 
As far as your team, as a team structure, and then what kind of background for their various skills is more important, I think it doesn't really matter. If you come from a tech side or come from a finance side, or come from working and actually practicing law, as long as you have one strong understanding, one set to as your basis, and then just have conversations, get involved in other things. I think that's the one great thing about our team is, as I was just discussing, we have team members that come from various backgrounds, that have a focus in different areas, but you really have to learn, and you really have to have that, you have to have your conversations internally with different departments to understand what they're doing, how they're doing it, what questions they need. Because a person who's good with the finance side might not know when you're working on a matter if there's a certain task that shouldn't be involved, and maybe their experience helps there. Or maybe if there's a project internally that our teams trying to build out, some either client-facing portal, the team members that are actually building out with the tech skills, might not have the understanding of which data points? Does it make sense to include these data points just for us internally versus adding these data points for the client? So, I guess to kind of end that question, I don't think it's necessarily one versus the other, but it's important for the whole team to have a solid base.

Melissa Prince 
To piggyback on what Dan said, soft skills are the most important parts of these jobs. He's right, that you can come from a variety of different backgrounds and excel in these roles, but you have to be also willing to, I think you have to have emotional intelligence, you have to get along with other people really well, you have to have good listening skills, and you have to be very analytical, and you have to just be willing to jump in and figure things out. I know I'm using this term a lot, but it's really about failing fast. And also being safe and not being afraid to try out something new that might not work out the first time you try it and try it again the next time and it might work. And I know, as far as like my role goes, from a chief-level position or a director-level position that's focused on client value, there's a lot of debate in the industry about whether having an MBA or a JD is better. I don't really know if I think strongly, I feel strongly one way or another, but you do have to have this certain analytical skill set and you have to really understand legal, which is a different beast than other industries. Whether you have legal training and you've been a lawyer, which allows you to kind of understand and see that, or whether you just have experience working at a large law firm, or you kind of understand how legal works from that, I think that's a really important thing to have. What's hard about selecting team members is that we're all business professionals at law firms, but you still hear all the time in legal about being nonlawyers. That’s such an offensive term and you got to be kind of thick-skinned about it. Because Dan, for example, has a finance background and probably understands how to run a law firm, better than some of our lawyers, but because he's a non-lawyer, the perception is he doesn't really understand legal. And I think that's slowly changing, but that's still something we encounter on a day-to-day basis, and it makes it sometimes really hard.

Aurelia Spivey 
You know, I've been in that position myself. I think that leads us nicely into the next question, which is, so what are the greatest challenges that business professionals at law firms are facing? And how are you overcoming them?

Melissa Prince 
I think the biggest challenges that I'm seeing is that there are really two and they're kind of interrelated. The first is that legal is still very old school, in the sense that it's slow to change and when we change, we change really slowly. The second issue is that it's really hard to get people to adopt different ways of doing things. And the reason why I say they're interrelated is because they kind of are. We're creatures that don't really want to change and then we don't really adopt the change, once it happens. So, a lot of it is just being really patient with how things move very slowly and not losing or getting frustrated or feeling like things are never going to be at the place where you need them to be. I think though, that what we're going to see, especially as more and more alternative legal solutions providers come in and can actually engage in the practice of law, that law firms are going to much more rapidly evolve, and change because they're going to have to. I'm honestly freaked out by the Arizona Supreme Court ruling a couple of weeks ago that allows alternative legal solutions providers to own an interest in law firms in Arizona because I think what's going to happen is we're going to evolve the way that the UK, New Zealand, and Australia have. And we're going to start to see the big four other alternative legal solutions providers start to much more deeply partner with law firms, which is going to cause us to have to think about much more quickly and innovatively about the ways that our law firms are operating.

Aurelia Spivey
It's a very interesting development and as you say, having that focus on business and change is, we're going to have to catch up as an industry. Dan, I wanted to talk to you a little bit more about something that you mentioned earlier, data. So I'd love to talk a little bit more about how you're leveraging data to increase precision around pricing. And if you're having any challenges, what are the greatest challenges in that area of data and analytics and pricing?

Dan Pope 
So yeah, to kind of go back for one of the comments that I made previously. Our current process, as it stands today, looks completely different than the process from a pricing perspective that our team used to use back in 2015 when we started. For firms like Ballard just, each fee earner puts down all of the actual time charges that they do on a day, that has so much detail about what was really happening there. But the problem, and I've talked to people at different firms, so this is definitely a problem or a concern for all firms, but we're capturing all this data, but it's not always in a proper format. When a brand new project comes in when a brand new matter comes in, is there any other information at that point? Can we capture some more information about the matter, who is going to be working on it? If there are certain tasks that we’re supposed to be working on, any stuff that should be included, and any stuff that we anticipate if it happens, it's not going to be in in a price point. So I guess to answer your question, the issue is then just eventually getting to a point and that perfect balance of asking our partners, asking our attorneys, to put down their thoughts, capture more information, more details than the pricing team can use. After a project is done, after a matter is done, going back and looking and saying, Okay, we thought that the actual course of the matter was going to go like this, but what really happened was, and then capturing that information. And that's the piece where I think Ballard, hopefully, within very soon can then start capturing that better because then it's really understanding what happened. Then when a project comes in, if we have more details, we have more data points about what happened previously, and we know something similar is going to happen. Then instead of pulling a bunch of matters that kind of felt the same, we would be able to say no, this happened in this matter, and we assume the exact same tasks or phases are probably going to happen again.

Aurelia Spivey 
Absolutely. It's about putting that data in context so that you can use it going forward. Another question I had it is, it is related, and I was going to ask Melissa this particular question about using technology to deliver services. I know when you talked about innovation, it's not all about technology. But how are your teams using technology to deliver services and that efficiency for the client or within the law firm?

Melissa Prince 
Well, there's a bunch of places that we are using it, but I think that in terms of an efficiency standpoint, we're basically using the process that we've always followed. But we're looking more closely at it in terms of team structure and the way that we're doing work in a cost-effective way. We are really using technology to solidify the process and help us to keep track of things better. In many cases, that involves document automation. So if we're doing a repetitive amount of work that relates to documents that we generate, over and over, we're using forms to generate the documents, which can be launched through technology applications, which also help us to be able to manage tasks and phases and to keep the client advised on what's happening. There are some cases too, where we've started to talk to our clients about partnering with them to use our technology, where they might be using it for all of their law firms but we build the technology and we talk to them because we understand the process that they follow and it's more cost-effective to do that. And then they use our technology with their other law firms to basically follow the same process if there is a reason why we can't do all of the client's work. Then there are also some cases now where our clients might be building technology that's similar to the technology that we're implementing but for different uses. So talking about developing API connections between what they're building and what we're building so that it creates a seamless exchange of data and information from a workflow perspective.

Aurelia Spivey 
Fantastic, and that's the second time that you mentioned API's. I think we absolutely agree that that is the way that we're going to be able to move things forward and that collaboration. I love the element where you talked about other firms using your technology to benefit the client. I think that is a great innovative story and a great partnership story that your clients want to be hearing about. So this has been a fantastic conversation and you saw that we always end on the question. We are on the pricing matters podcast, so Dan, tell me why does pricing matter to you? 

Dan Pope 
I would say pricing matters to me because it does kind of combines all of the kind of background I have. With the experiences and the tech angles and having to be able to not just be in a role where I sit and then it's the same thing over and over again. Pricing matters to me and it's important because I view it more as a science. 

Melissa Prince 
Pricing matters to me because it matters to our clients. And if we get it right, It makes the difference in terms of long-lasting partnerships, which is really what we care about. And if we get it wrong, it has the ability to leave a sour taste in our client's minds and make us not look good. While there are other parts of what we do from a legal perspective, that are incredibly important, this is the first step in many cases where a new matter comes in the door where we have the opportunity to really interact with the client. And in most cases, I'm hoping that they're happy with the interaction and that they trust our process because we are good at what we do. And because we are constantly looking at team structure and making sure that the team is diverse and we're making sure that we're giving the best available pricing options to the client. So, that's why it matters because it's the starting place for everything.

Aurelia Spivey
Well, thank you so much. I think that's a wonderful way to end the starting place for everything. This is a great ending for this podcast. So thank you both so much for joining me and for having this conversation today. 

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.