Aurelia Spivey, Marketing Consultant with BigHand, chats with James Shoemaker, Director of Pricing and Matter Management at Miles & Stockbridge P.C., and Steven Manton, Pricing Director at McDermott Will & Emery LLP. In this episode, we take a deep dive into Intersect 2020 which is the True Value Partnering Institute(“TVPI”) Annual Conference, held in Miami in January. You can also enjoy this video recapping the event.
Our guests James Shoemaker and Steven Manton speak to us in their capacity as TVPI advisors. We explore highlights from the Intersect 2020 conference, including key takeaways from sessions on leadership, change management, and resilience with a focus on the evolving role of the business of law expert.
The True Value Partnering Institute is a legal industry think tank focused on professional development and thought leadership at the intersection of the practice and the business of law. The Institute has become the definitive community for senior legal business professionals - those responsible for delivering value inside and outside their organizations.
Top three takeaways from this episode
James Shoemaker is an Accredited Legal Pricing Professional (ALPP) and certified legal project manager with nearly 20 years of industry experience. In his current role as the Director of Pricing and Matter Management at Miles & Stockbridge P.C., he is responsible for setting pricing strategy, consulting with partners and clients on pricing solutions, and establishing a matter management framework of tools and processes to ensure efficient delivery of legal services. This includes oversight for all the following functions: pricing, rate setting, legal project management (i.e., “matter management”), new business acceptance, and the establishment and maintenance of the required supporting systems and infrastructure for these functions.
Prior to taking on a business services role, Jim served in fee-earning capacities as a paralegal, then in electronic discovery and litigation support. This experience informs his change management approach, as he can relate to how today’s practitioners must balance the competing demands of legal practice and the business of law.
A frequent speaker on the topics of legal pricing and project management, Jim’s core focus remains on maximizing the value of legal services by helping align the firm’s pricing and service delivery models with its clients’ legal needs and business objectives. Jim earned his B.A. from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).
Steven Manton is a Pricing Director at McDermott Will & Emery LLP. Steven is responsible for the creation and development of the firm’s pricing and legal project management function across all the firm’s offices.
Steven is a highly knowledgeable law and business graduate with a Masters qualification and twenty years of legal sector experience. Recognized as a leading law firm pricing, practice optimization and profitability specialist who regularly teaches and publishes on pricing legal services and building the law firm pricing function. Steven has management experience within forward thinking law firms, including a leading private equity/corporate finance boutique law firm in London, UK; one of the most prominent and reputable New York law firms; a leading National full service US law firm; and the world's most reputable global energy industry law firm.
Steven is active in the legal community and serves on the Advisory Council of the True Value Partnering Institute, a legal industry think tank and is also a member of the Research Advisory Board for the Client Value and Law Firm Profitability Report published by Jim Hassett Phd.
Something as simple as just breathing has made a complete change to the way I will deal with those situations that are coming at me many times throughout the day.
Podcast Transcript:
Steven Manton
One of our mottos is if people come to Intersect 2020 as a stranger and leave as a friend. And that's very much how its, and people will continue those relationships hopefully throughout their entire careers that they make while meeting with us and also developing skills and learnings from some of the top educators and professionals in the world.
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. This morning we've got a fantastic episode. We're going to be speaking with two advisors from the True Value Partnering Institute and we're going to be talking about their Intersect Conference, which happened in January 2020. So let me introduce my guests. This morning we've got Jim Shoemaker, he is the Director of Pricing and Meta Management at Miles & Stockbridge.
Good morning, Jim.
James Shoemaker
Good morning. Thank you for having me.
Aurelia Spivey
You're welcome. I also have Steve Manton, the Pricing Director at McDermott Will & Emery.
Good morning, Steve Morning.
Steven Manton
Happy to be here and again thank you for having us on.
Aurelia Spivey
You're welcome. So, as I said we're here in your capacity as advisors for the True Value Partnering Institute. So I'm going to ask you each to give me a little bit about your background, but particularly how you became involved at the institute. So Jim, would you like to take it away?
James Shoemaker
Sure, yeah, thank you, Aurelia. So I've been working in legal for roughly 20 years in various capacities on both the practice and business side of the law. So I started out very early on as a litigation paralegal at another firm and did all sorts of different things at that firm, bankruptcy, litigation to large class actions, and so forth and that led me into the direction of electronic discovery and litigation support. Kind of as the law evolved, the practice of law evolved and the technology around its evolved, I sort of saw a niche opportunity there to move in a slightly different direction and begin adding more value to the firm and that led me into a whole bunch of different things such as legal process improvement, project management. So I kind of cut my teeth on a lot of the things that I'm doing now in a more formal and in a different setting, I'd say around value and so forth at that the present firm. But I have that unique perspective where I can empathize with the practitioners and really put myself into their shoes and understand where they're coming from and the things that they might be struggling with as they balance the business and practice. So I think that's something that kind of makes my background a bit unique.
I know that there are several folks out there who are also practitioners, lawyers, and so forth. So I think that helps them as they move into the change agent role, that they may have today in pricing and project management. And then I became involved with TVPI, the Institute, probably about five or six years ago. Very early on I was one of the founding members of the LPM cohort that we stood up and I think I may have presented our first topic presentation on the very first call that cohort and eventually wound up leading that cohort with some other folks, who I hold in high regard. That sort of evolved into me becoming more and more involved with the leadership of the institute and working with friends like Steve and John Feco and some other folks on the advisory board to kind of move it forward and really create a true community for these business law professionals. So it's been a real joy, just both personally and professionally, and a lot of growth in both of those areas for me. So I find it to be tremendously valuable on all accounts.
Aurelia Spivey
Fantastic. Thanks for sharing that with us. And I've been looking at the website and following the conference quite closely and I can see that they've got real momentum. So I'm really excited to be talking about that as we go forward in the conversation.
Steve, would you like to tell us a little about yourself and your journey to the TVPI as well?
Steven Manton
Sure, happy to. Going back many years now, I actually studied law in the UK and when I came to the States, I went to work for Shearman and Sterling, actually in New York, and was started actually in marketing and then rapidly moved into practice management. And so, practice management obviously is like being a COO of a practice group. So you are running everything in a practice group from lateral integration, looking at the staffing, looking at the profitability, how the group is structured, is there the right leverage in place to enhance profit margin. Looking at all the client relationships, making sure they're being run in a profitable way. Making sure we're utilizing technology knowledge management. So it was a really full-faceted role and then I joined Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in that role as well, for their corporate group, and while I was there, we started doing pricing. Now, this was long before pricing became a hot topic that is today, way, way before the crash. Just because they were looking at how to target certain markets and use price as one of the levers to grow market share. Obviously then, the financial crisis hit, and pricing suddenly became a really useful skill that law firms were craving and needing to stop the eradication of profit. And I ended up with Debevoise & Plimpton, I let their pricing function for many years, and then joined McDermott Will & Emery and do the same here.
Now, my journey to the True Value Partnering Institute was really several years ago. Pricing was pretty new in the industry, as was legal project management. And we were getting together infrequently. We were gathering at some of the big conferences, which is fantastic, and those conferences are great for education, and we were networking there, but we didn't have a platform for us to meet on a regular basis. So it really started with a few of us just saying, look, let's do a monthly telephone call and a few of us got on a call and every month we had a telephone call. And then as other pricing people and LPM people came into the marketplace, we said we'd invite them. Do you want to join this monthly telephone call? And it really just grew out of that. It was just us getting a few people together, a few of the pricing leaders on a regular basis, and having a monthly telephone call. It grew and grew and grew as this sort of profession grew. Now obviously we have that big conference in Miami Intersect 2020, which we just did. And I think the focus now is on what, and how we are developing and our role as a business of law leaders because we're not just about pricing and LPM. We all have these businesses of law functions where we're bringing value internally to our organizations and now externally to the clients. It's really turning now into a business of law focus.
Aurelia Spivey
I love that story of that sort of organic grassroots growth and that brings me really nicely to the question I have, which is about the conference. So I'd love to know a little bit about the vision behind this conference and just some of the key themes that you chose to focus on. So Steve, would you like to tell us a little bit about that?
Steven Manton
Sure. I mean, over time, what we've been seeing is us as a function expanding and progressing and growing. And so a lot of people who attended our prior conferences, which we just called our Value Annual Meeting, it was more about you're doing pricing and doing LPM, how do you build those skills? How do you develop those skills and become the best pricing on LPM innovator for your law firms to bring value? As the roles have evolved, it came very clear that we do much more than that. We are business law experts. The typical head of a pricing function and head of an LPM function is involved in many things. We sit across a number of departments, we're not siloed anyway. So we have, we do a bit of marketing and business development, client relationship management. We do profitability. We're bringing tools into place, so we're doing technology stuff. We're coaching partners. We negotiate against clients. We help change systems internally in firms. So it's a pretty wide ambit when you think of what is it that the community is gathering around in Intersect 2020.
We decided to rebrand it and say it's called Where Legal Value and the Business of Law Meet, because we're all based on value and we all have these businesses of law expertise and experience, and we're all pretty seasoned. And so it's a very experienced body of individuals that make up this community. And so what is it that we need to be successful and we came up with these five pillars of what it needs to be successful. It's leadership, coaching, change management, resilience, and design thinking. As we unbundled what we need to be successful, and we looked, we developed these five key pillars, we said, let's have a conference around this. So it doesn't matter if you're a pricing person, it doesn't matter if you're an LPM person. It doesn't matter if you're an innovator. It doesn't matter if you're a head of a BD function. What are the skills you need to be successful? And there isn't another conference out there that focuses on these particular skills to make one successful so that you can bring value both internally to your organizations and help value between the law firm and the client relationship.
One of the things we did at Intersect 2020 was to run some pre-conference workshops. And there were a couple of thinkings around this. Number one, Intersect 2020, the main conference was very much focused on the pillars to make you successful. That's leadership, coaching, change management, resilience, and design thinking and we brought in the true experts around those five pillars to help us succeed. Naturally, we have people who have just entered leadership roles, there are always people entering leadership roles. And so, there are people who have just become up, just made a Chief Pricing Officer, they just made a Pricing Director or heading an LPM function. So we wanted to put on very specialized workshops that would appeal to those people, but also on the pricing workshop, we wanted to appeal to other roles within law firms who may not be exposed to pricing but want to learn more. So whether you're a chief marketing officer and you don't have a pricing function, but you're doing RFPs and you need to understand a bit more about pricing to help do those the best you can. Chief Financial Officers, you're not strictly doing pricing, you understand the financial aspects, but you may not be, have a lot of experience in negotiation and so pricing is a lot of negotiation and client relationship management aspects to it. You might be running the IT function and you're doing pricing stuff. It'd be useful to learn more as you're putting these tools in place. And then, and also, more importantly, you're a partner in a law firm who, you don't have a pricing function in a law firm, but you have clients that are pressurizing you. How do you say no to clients? Practice group leaders as well. We were, and we put the invite out to practice group leaders and managing partners. So it really was, we did a four-hour session, a deep dive on pricing, which was done by Kevin Dulan who taught the pricing case study at Harvard to have people come in who don't have a pricing function in their firm, but are touching on it. Whether it's there providing that service to their partners in an ad hoc way, or whether they're actually a partner facing a client who is trying to drive them down on price. So we built this pre-workforce conference workshop on that and it went down really well. It was a, it is cross-functional, we had partners there, we had practice group leaders there, we had chief financial officers there, we had marketing people there, and it was a great session. As well as, people who just entered leadership roles in the pricing function.
Aurelia Spivey
Thanks for sharing that, that sounds super helpful and something in my previous roles in business development I would've been interested in attending myself because I think this intersection and this collaboration across the firm is so important, and being able to speak each other's languages is only going to benefit the clients and bring that value to the clients and the firm.
Steven Manton
Or there are so many roles across, you take a law firm, there are so many roles across a law firm that add value. Most functions are adding value in some shape or form internally to their law firms and then some functions are adding value externally between the law firm and the client relationship. Each of these functions, you're right, they have people who lead these functions and they're brace seasoned people. You've got CMOs, you've got CIOs, you Chief Financial Officers, you've got Chief Strategy officers, Chief Innovation Officers, you've got Chief Pricing Officers, Cheif Leaders of LPM.
Each of these individuals collectively provides a huge amount of value to their law firms. The idea of Intersect 2020 was to provide a platform where these most senior people, I like to call them the business of law experts, can come together and learn the skills that they need to be successful. But not only the skills around leadership and coaching and change management, but also learning the skills from one another. You know, help me understand a bit more about what you do. I let you understand more about what I do. So we go back to our firms collectively, and we raise the value internally.
Aurelia Spivey
Jim, I'd love to hear your take on this evolution and the rebranding of the conference.
James Shoemaker
Yeah, I mean, just to follow on some of Steve's points there, we had had historically, and I wasn't fortunate enough to attend the earliest of the meetings, which were smaller, but the focus had predominantly been on pricing and to some degree legal project management. So we were really looking to create a more well-rounded event, that took into consideration all these pillars that Steve mentioned. Most importantly I think was that kind of through the lens of value, looking at the kind of the operation side, the business law side of the house. For example, Steve mentioned all the things that he does in his firm and the expertise that our counterparts have at other firms. I, for example, in my role get involved very deeply in operational exercises and creating workflows and trying to operationalize our pricing program and some other things.
So I think it's very easy for folks who are doing that to get bogged down in those specific exercises of trying to create internal efficiencies. But it really needs to be viewed through the lens of how does this create value for your end client ultimately. And I think it's tremendously helpful to lean on an organization like TVPI who's done all this, laid all this groundwork, and try trying to really study that closely and tie that back into the other functions within our organizations.
Aurelia Spivey
We're all talking about collaboration, in all shapes and forms, across the industry. So I think it's great to have that combined skill to bring to the firm and what I wanted to do is really actually dig in quite deeply into the conference. So I'm going to really go through some of the sessions that stood out to me when I was reviewing this and putting this interview together. I'm going to get your take on it and particularly some of the practical things that you're able to bring back to the office. Now having had this fantastic experience of immersion with your peers, I wanted to talk about the leadership session that James Bailey put together and it was called Leading the Business of Law and How Leading Yourself Leads to Leading Others. So, tell me some of the top tips that you are going to be bringing back to the office, having engaged in that session.
James Shoemaker
We got tons of really positive feedback from the attendees on Dr. Bailey's sessions. I recall an AmLaw 20 CFO was at our conference, tapping me on the shoulder during the first break and saying, this is wonderful, I haven't heard the letters AFA mentioned yet, and we've been here for an hour and thirty minutes. I was thrilled by that because we were really taking things in a slightly different direction but in a really good way. In a way that took into consideration feedback that we'd gotten from attendees of prior meetings.
So me specifically, I found his sessions to be really just impactful in terms of how to be introspective and think about yourself as a leader and why your team would want, or anyone in your firm or anyone outside of your firm at home, wherever you may be, would want to follow you. And so, he gave us some real practical tools around that to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses, where you may have gaps, and how you can by sitting down and taking the time to really study yourself and be introspective. You can use that as a way to, not really necessarily prop up members of your team, but to say, Hey, this is a weakness that I have. A form of leadership would be to recognize that and allow somebody on my team who has that strengths, that could fill that gap as a tool to becoming a better leader and creating momentum and change within your organization.
So, I'm still working on those things. It's not an easy exercise to go through, to really put yourself under the microscope like that. But we had a series of sessions, exercises within his session, where we broke off into teams of three and would basically work through some of these problems and share them back out to a coach within that smaller pot of attendees and work through that one at a time and hear feedback from each other. So I thought it was a really great session that Dr. Bailey put on. He's just a wonderful presenter. So he kept everybody very engaged, which is very much in line with the core values and the objectives of our meeting and the institute, which is active participation.
Aurelia Spivey
Steve, we'd love to get your take on it and your experience of Dr. Bailey at the conference, and more generally, we'd love to hear from you.
Steven Manton
Yeah, obviously Dr. Bailey's fantastic. For those who aren't aware of Dr. Bailey or come across him, he is a fellow of leadership development at George Washington University. He's one of the top most renowned educators in leadership and coaching. He was voted by the International Council of Executive Leadership Development as being one of the tops, at least one of the top executive educators. He's done 50 academic papers. He's a real machine in this area and one of the most renowned people in the sector, obviously he does things with law firms as well, which is why he wanted to come and speak to us and work with us. I actually studied under him at George Washington University for my master's. The great thing about Dr. Bailey is you really have to peel back the onion around yourself to get into this leadership stuff, and he has a very good way of doing that. As Jim said, it was very active. It wasn't just him talking about leadership, we actually broke out into groups and peel back the onion a little bit on our own personalities and whether we were good leaders or bad leaders. Because that obviously leads to how well you can coach, which is the second half of what he spoke about. And it tied very well into one of our core values of the institute, which is humility.
And humility is, and we have six core values. One is fellowship, one's active participation, humility, integrity, and community, that's the founding of the True Value Partnering Institute. And humility is, when we're out in public, when we're out doing our jobs, we're always putting on this armor that we are the best and the very best in the industry, the best at what we do. In law firms, one doesn't typically reveal a weakness in this environment, or you don't at least get the opportunity to do it in a way that is productive. So in this environment, everyone had to reveal their weaknesses, and you have to do that to grow as a leader. So I thought it was really engaging. Everyone did this because we're such a close-knit group of people. We have a real thing around fellowship where we support each other. We are a real community. So in this environment of 85 people sitting in the room, we were able to get people in groups to reveal their weaknesses and talk through what makes them a good leader? What makes them a bad leader?
There were a couple of quotes that he came out with, which I thought were very interesting. He took quotes from business leaders and one of the business leaders said, do a little better bit by bit day by day. And I thought that was a great quote. And this is a business leader of one of the largest corporations in the world. Small shifts have an impact, was another message. So it's all about growing in incremental pieces and just trying to improve yourself day by day. But whereas another good learning that came out was good leaders reveal their weaknesses. And that's the thing, you've got to be able to reveal your weakness, which is why we have these group sessions. Break down the onion and in front of peers say these are my weaknesses and this is how I can improve. It was done in an environment that worked, just worked very well within the group that we pulled together. So there's a lot of learnings around that and then obviously as you've revealed your weakness, it's about constructing yourself to be a better leader.
I thought one of the great exercises he came up with was, writing your own leadership obituary. I thought this is really interesting. So there are two parts to this exercise. One was to write the obituary that you would like people to say about you, about your leadership, and your qualities of coaching. Then write an honest obituary about where you are now and see how do they compare. How does where you are now compared to where you want to be as far as having your obituary written and then trying and come up with small steps to bridge the gap and get from one to the other. And I think that was very enlightening for people to sit back and really in this environment, peel back the onion, turn internally and say, okay, this is what I'd like to be, this is what I am. Reveal it in front of people and then put an action plan in place as to how you're going to go away and start thinking about that and how you're going to incorporate that into the teams that you lead, how you're going to incorporate that into your interactions with the other partners in the firm. How you're going to incorporate that into interactions with other departments, whether it's the secretary around the corner, whether it's the chief marketing officer, whether it's a technology person, whether it's a person who works in the print room, how do you impact their day and how do you help them become better. And ultimately that floats up into the whole firm feeling better. That was the core learning for leadership.
Aurelia Spivey
That's very powerful and I think it leads us quite nicely to my next question, which is about breaking out of the pricing silo. And what you were talking about is impacting all these different people in the firm. So, I'd love to hear from you in terms of the session that Kevin Dolan put together. And it was about how to break out of the pricing silo and focus on the role of being a business expert in the business of law. So could you tell us a little bit about what you learned in that session?
Steven Manton
Sure, sure. First of all, I'll just give some background on Kevin Dulan, because people may not be aware of Kevin. Kevin is a, he teaches at Harvard, and he teaches the pricing case study at Harvard Law. He's an ex-partner at a premium UK law firm, and he actually for, I think 10 years headed up their client development program as a partner, that was what he was in charge of, and got into a lot of pricing stuff there and client relationship development. Then he came, he wrote a book, took some time out, and wrote a book on professional services pricing, it's one of the professional services pricing books in the UK and is now in the industry. Then he came out, he consulted into law firm on developing a coaching and developing pricing program. So he is really one of the permanent pricing people in the industry.
I think that's another attraction of the Intersect and the conferences that the True Value Partnering Institute put on, is that we bring in real experts. It's not us teaching us, it's we go out there and we find the real top experts in the legal sector and often outside the legal sector to come in and teach us. So that's just how we managed to find Kevin. He comes to our conferences every year and gives some teachings.
But back to the session he did, which I thought was very interesting, which is about breaking out the pricing sort of role or LPM role. I think that it tied into this whole concept of we are business of law experts and this whole conference was around getting the true business of law expertise into one place. It has not been done before, where we have the people who have got this law experience, but they're still put into these sort of silos, but they've got this great breadth of experience. And so if you take pricing example, what is it you can do as a pricing person to help bring out your business law skills because we've all got them. We do the profitability, we do the change management, we do the leadership, and we work across all the different departments in law firms. His main learning was that you have the skills. You understand what it takes to run a law firm from the financial aspects, from leadership, from practice group economics, and from lateral integration. You're sitting in the middle of the business of law. And so how do you convey that to your firm so that they fully utilize this skillset you have.
I think his big learning was you got everyone to sit down and think about, what is it that keeps the managing partner awake. That should be a starting point in your thought. What is it that keeps the managing partner awake at night? And how can you, as a business law expert go to the managing partner and provide practical solutions with a roadmap and action items, to solve those solutions. So that you actually become the right-hand person, of senior leadership in your firm, who are tackling lots of things outside pricing, but fundamentally what a lot of things they're tackling the pricing function is already dealt with, whether it's because they've come out of a marketing background of finance, a background of practice, management background. We already sit in the center of the profitability, which drives profit margin in a law firm. How can you bring that expertise to the managing partner, to the leadership, and to get involved in cross-functional projects? Because you really do sit in the middle and you see things from all sides.
Aurelia Spivey
Fantastic, it sort of brings you to the same question you ask of clients. What is keeping the GC up at night? So it's having that parallel within your firm. I wanted to talk a little bit more about the legal product, project management, and the LPM track. And one of the sessions that was run by Kim Craig and Josh Kubuicki of Bold Duck Studios, about being a change agent. So, Jim, I'd love to hear from you. Can you share some of your key takeaways from the sessions that they ran?
James Shoemaker
Absolutely. So, we were thrilled to have Kim and Josh with us in Miami this year. I've known Kim for many years and she's pretty well known out there in the LPM circles and outside of those circles, and is beloved by clients as well. I would consider Kim to be one of the earliest pioneers of legal project management during her time at Seyfarth. She was well ahead of her time in terms of introducing lean and other aspects of project management to that firm. They became the gold standard for implementing legal project management. So, it was a real treat to have them. Now, I'll say this, it wasn't the actual content that they put on, and wasn't specifically legal project management-oriented, it was a bit broader than that. And I think that was true to the theme of the conference overall. We were really looking at things more holistically in terms of thinking of the firm as a portfolio of businesses and trying to figure out how to approach change in that context and to really zero in on where the operational stress is occurring within a practice group as it relates to the larger firm and thinking through that so that you can then implement change.
I did want to point out, Steve mentioned a couple of great lines from Jim Bailey, and one that I recall vividly was with all change, even positive change comes loss. So even if you are promoted to another role or move to another firm and get a promotion, you're leaving behind friends and there's just, there's always change. Change is hard, even when it's a good change. A lot of us who are in these businesses of law roles or are pushing forward legal project management, which is truly a change management project in and of itself. Using change management and design and being able to empathize with the end users who are typically the lawyers or your clients and putting yourself in their shoes and figuring out like, in their orbit, what are the challenges and obstacles that they're running up against, that make it difficult for them to change the behaviors or use new tools or new processes or lean on professional staff to help move the needle and improve client relations or profitability, whatever it may be that you're trying to do. I thought that it was just a really unique take on a lot of these topics and themes.
I think Kim and Josh come at it from a very different place and it was very eye-opening for me personally. I mean, they've spent a lot of time thinking about these issues and have come up with some practical ways of working through the problems. For example one of the sessions that we had, they put in front of each attendee what they've termed, I believe it was an operational stress canvas, which really was a tool meant for you to sit down and constructively sketch out your roadmap and figure out what the problem or opportunity is. One of the things on the canvas that I'm recalling now was, ask yourself, who cares? If you're identifying obstacles, then give obstacles to the business of law professional or the pricing professional, or it'll be a project management professional, but they might, or may not be perceived as obstacles to the lawyer or even the client. So it's really about the design piece. And one thing that I kept having to check myself on when we were working through our business of design lab, the business of law design lab that they put on as one of the pre-conference workshops, was you making sure that you don't, and this is their phrase or borrowed phrase from perhaps somewhere else was, make sure that you're not solution jumping.
I think a lot of us think that we are the smartest person in the room or that we've spent more time thinking through these issues than maybe a lawyer has or a managing partner, whoever it may be. And, or even IT, and other cross-functional stakeholders, we might think that they don't really understand the issue. So let's jump to a solution without really thinking through all the different stakeholder challenges that might be in front of you. So, we titled it a legal project management track, but really in its a truer sense, it was a lot broader than that. I thoroughly enjoyed it myself and we got a lot of positive feedback from the other attendees in the room.
Aurelia Spivey
Excellent. Yeah, and change, as you said, change is hard and it's only going to get harder and more of it in the industry at the moment. So having the tools to be able to tackle it at your firm effectively is more and more important.
What I wanted to talk about next was the session on resilience and stress, which Paula Davis-Laack put together. And obviously, there's a big focus at the moment on mental health in the industry and I'd love to hear from you, about some things that maybe you are doing differently yourself or for your team in 2020, having listened to and attended that session. Steve, would you like to share first?
Steven Manton
Sure. Absolutely. Again, this was one of the five pillars we've identified as to how one can succeed professionally, personally, and be the best that you can be. It was leadership, coaching, change management, resilience, and design thinking. So it made sense to find one of the top people in the legal sector who deals with resilience. Obviously, this is stress management because there has been so much written, as you mentioned, on mental health and law firms. As you know, this is a stressful environment, when you, if you are a business of law expert, if it's pricing, LPM, innovation, business development, or technology. If you're involved in those sorts of business of law areas, we work in a very stressful environment and everyday stresses come at us from many different directions. And often it's out of the blue and if you cannot manage your stress, it can impact everything. It can impact your performance, it can impact your health, and it can impact relationships. It really is this glue and frankly, I was aware of it, but then when Paula Davis-Laack came in and really gave us some insights into it, I recognized, yeah, you're right. Managing stress is probably one of the biggest challenges that we all have. Whether it's becoming a good leader, whether it's becoming a coach, managing the stress is the glue that holds that together. If you can't learn to manage stress in a positive way, everything else can and will probably unravel.
A bit about Paula, she is literally one of three lawyers in the world who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, that has applied for a positive psychology program, and she actually has spent a lot of time dealing with soldiers coming back from war. They come back with these very intense, stressful experiences they've been through and how do they get back into society and deal with obviously different stresses, but deal with what they've built up and experienced over the time at war. So she spends a lot of time dealing with soldiers returning from war. So she's a true expert at this.
I think everyone was fascinated by her session because it really was about how do you remain positive under stress. And what are the tools you can use and how can you deal with stress in a way that is a positive outcome for all? I learned from it a very, huge amount, frankly, I think everyone else did. And to the extent now that I have a little placard on my wall that I put up here as a result of going to a session. I can read it to you actually if you like. The title is, Deep Breathing is Calming When You Are Anxious or Stressed and then the guidance under that is to take a deep calming breath, stand or sit whichever feels most comfortable. Take a deep breath through your nose, expand your ribcage, and envision the bottom of your lungs filling up. Hold your breath for a count of three, and excel through your mouth for a count of six. Repeat. It's just something I put on my wall when I came back from that session because she was talking a lot about meditation, breathing, and how your initial emotions, when you're stressed, are very different from a reaction you may be giving. And what you want to do is find a moment to control that emotion. Let it pass, and come back down to a non-emotional way of thinking. So you can actually look at things in a way and interpret it what's going on around you in something that's more logical when that initial sort of rush of emotion comes and that initial rush of emotion is absolute, it's completely natural. We're designed to be stressful, to get stressful. We were designed when something is attacking us, we very quickly become very stressed. Now we live in this very fast environment where we have these stresses coming us all the time. But something as simple as just breathing has made a complete change to the way I will deal with those situations that are coming at me many times throughout the day.
Aurelia Spivey
Fantastic. Thanks for sharing that and for sharing what's on your wall. Jim, would do you have anything you'd like to add from your takeaways from that session?
James Shoemaker
Sure. Yeah. So Paula's session was really fantastic, I thought. Steve's talking about the mindfulness aspect of things, and I think it really does help you slow down and optimize your thinking and how you're dealing with issues. Bringing Paula in was a very deliberate move on the part of the folks who organized the contents of the conference. It was a perfect bookend to Dr. Bailey's session on leadership. I thought, Dr. Bailey came in and gave us all the tools, are not all, but most of the tools that we probably need to become better leaders. But those don't do you any good if you're not able to operate because of the stretch management side of things. And Paula talks about investing in relationships and different ways to do that. I think those kinds of overlap nicely with the leadership concepts that Dr. Bailey introduced. So, to me, I thought it really just tied off the content and the pillars that Steve discussed very nicely.
Aurelia Spivey
Fantastic. So I was going to ask you both, and we'll start with you, Jim. What was the most surprising or interesting new thing that you learned about pricing or project management or the business of law over the course of those two days?
James Shoemaker
So, let me think, that's a good question. I would say in the LPM track and the Bold Duck sessions. I was exposed to some very interesting conversations. Obviously, we share as much as we can but there are limits to what we can share. That being said, I'm at a midsize regional firm, that has most of the practices that a general services firm would have, including example, labor, and employment services. It was very interesting for me to be in the room where you had a table of pricing directors, and four successive pricing directors from one of the preeminent labor and employment shops out there talking about how they saw change transpire in that specific sub-group or sub-practice of the legal industry.
To me there were specific things that I was able to bring back into my firm and sit down with the leaders of that practice group in my firm and really start to impart knowledge on them to say, Hey, I realize that you have these tidbits of information based on the legal press and information that's out there, but here's what's really happening and here's how we need to sit down and start thinking about it. So that's just one nugget. I don't necessarily, I wouldn't call it surprising because those are the types of things that we really get out of TVPI. In general, is us leaning on each other as a community and home for legal, business of law professionals and being able to take our program or pricing or legal project management programs to the next level.
Aurelia Spivey
Excellent, and Steve, what would you put in that category of something new that you learned over the course of those two days?
Steven Manton
Yeah, there are a couple of things. I think, if I think specifically about pricing, I think what was very interesting was to see and experience this whole evolution to the business of law profession and what I think was very interesting was the rapid growth of what we do, and where it's going. Many people now are on the front line of building client relationships and managing client relationships and I think that was a good learning. Many of us in the pricing role deal with legal operations and legal procurement and the in-house legal function, as part of our role.
But a lot has moved beyond just pricing. The pressures are slightly different. They're still there, obviously, clients want to get value for money, and law firms want to provide value for money. We're all trying to get to the same end game. And so the conversation has changed, I would think even from 12 months ago. It's much more about finding value, it's much more about collaboration, and this is between the law firm and the clients, between, the pricing people and in-house legal operations and in-house legal teams. It's much more about how do we meet this value challenge in a way. Clients want value for money, law firms want to provide value for money. We're all rowing in the same direction here. It's less about this negotiation on price. It's less about hourly rates, it's more about the conversation that is definitely changing and has changed to how can we collaborate together, how can you help us deliver value, and how can we help you receive value? So that's been a real shift, I think literally in the last 12 months, which is very interesting.
We had another interesting discussion that came outta the Kevin Doolan session. As you're probably going to be seeing a lot more business of law experts, whether they're pricing people or other professionals, being out sent out front and center with client relationships, and actually really becoming client relationship managers. Where we're helping to grow client relationships, make sure that things are being run effectively and efficiently, and make sure that the services are being delivered in a way that it's profitable, both for the law firm and a value for the client.
That was one key interesting discussion and learning that I had. The other one I think was all about these, I wouldn't call them soft skills, I'd call them critical skills. We very much focus the conference on those five pillars, leadership, coaching, resilience, change management, and design thinking, and how those five pillars really on their own and collectively help you succeed. So you really need to focus, even though we're very busy, on each of these five pillars to really meet your true potential as a law professional. And I thought that was very interesting to have all that come together under one roof and in one place for great learning and great discussions.
Aurelia Spivey
Excellent, thank you for sharing that. What I want you to do, is that sort of two final questions to wrap things up. I'd love to hear from you any findings from the GC thought experiment that you think would be interesting for our listeners to hear. Jim, would you like to come in on that question?
James Shoemaker
Sure. Yeah. We had one of the directors or managing directors from Advanced Law join us as faculty, Aaron Kotok. Aaron is, I think he's a former practicing lawyer, I think he practiced as an associate Venable, and turned data wonk, for lack of a better term. And he works at Advanced Law to collaborate with a pretty large segment of general counsel to collect data around client law firm relationships. I think one of the most, maybe provocative findings of theirs, is the ineffectiveness of law firm panels or convergence programs versus the performance of off-panel law firms, servicing clients. And they actually, the reason that's provocative is, because one part of Advanced Law as a business is to run those convergence or panel exercises.
So, they've actually started to study, a different approach, which is creating law firms summits. So taking your preferred council and holding summits with them where you can share, similar to what we were doing in Miami, we're bouncing ideas off of each other, sharing knowledge, and imparting wisdom based on your dealings with clients across firms. So he had some really hard, concrete data findings around that, and it was, I think comparing that relative performance across different dimensions of the relationship. I think solutions focus is like one of the main metrics that they try to capture, which is an interesting one. It kind of, just to follow on Steve's comments that he just made, it's less about the spending and reducing spend or even controlling costs. While that's important, I think what clients really want, or at least what Advanced Law's data is telling us, is that clients are more focused on getting from their firm's results that are solution focused or oriented, and basically really understanding your clients' needs more and coming to them proactively with recommendations on how they can, how the legal department can deliver value to the broader organization. So, really good stuff from the Advanced Law folks, and we were really happy to have them with us.
Aurelia Spivey
That's a very interesting finding. Steve, was there anything different, that you wanted to add from that session?
Steven Manton
Yeah, I took away one, I thought, a very interesting snippet of information. It was just, it was one slide that they, it was put up actually towards the end of the session that Advanced Law was doing, but it got a lot of attention and a lot of cameras came out taking pictures, this one slide. It was a tactical piece of advice about when you start a relationship with a client, a new client, how do you nail the start? And on reflection, it seems quite simple. Which is what may be simple things, the golden nuggets in the rough right? And so it basically laid out a roadmap, day one to seven, and this is all at your own firm's expense. From day one to seven have a relationship meeting and establish a plan, understand your key challenges and issues, and set ways of working standards. So do that in the first week of a new relationship. Day seven, ways of working standards relate to all team members. So you convey it back to your team. So everyone on the law firm side has an understanding of how you're going to work together. Everyone on the client side does.
Between days eight and 30, is a business orientation to help you get to know the key business teams, we can help you to support. This is a knowledge solutions manager. Maybe you've got a client portal that would be useful. Maybe you've got some wizard sort of piece of technologies that can help them reduce cost. Get them orientated with some of your business solutions that provide value. In months one to three, core teams meet with you to understand objectives and ensure our advice and approach compliments your developing business needs. So again, meet again after one to three months with the client and make sure everyone's aligned. And then at the end of three months, have your first formal relationship review meeting with the client. So it's very, it was an interesting roadmap. I think people often forget, or you are in the business of running very successful law firms and client relationships and you bring on a new, you fight so hard to get a new client relationship, we really pull out all the stops to get them. Within the first three months, there are things you can do that will cement that relationship for years and years, if not decades to come. I thought that was a very interesting slide he put up there and it got a lot of attention, but very simple, right? These are just simple processes you can put in place that will probably have huge returns if you did that with all your new cloud relationships.
Aurelia Spivey
Absolutely. Well, thank you for sharing that and I think it is sometimes, it's going back to the simple things and it's similar to onboarding partners and just onboarding people in a new job. That beginning piece is so important to establish that relationship. So thanks, that's a great takeaway.
So finally, we come to the crystal ball part of the podcast. You've both shared some really interesting developments that you learn at the conference, and I'm going to ask for a little bit more from you and, in the next decade, what do you think it's going to bring for legal pricing and project management? Jim, would you like to go first and then Steve, I'd love to hear from you.
James Shoemaker
Sure, I typically don't like to prognosticate too much.
Aurelia Spivey
We won't hold you to it.
James Shoemaker
Well, I won't stretch the limits here too much. So, and Steve can speak to this. I mean one of the things that the institute has been hyper-focused on is really solidifying and advancing the professions. And that's being done obviously through thought leadership and in our events and cohorts and regional meetings and so forth and surveys. We've run salary surveys within a partnership with Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute to get white papers out there that talk about the role and really just further solidify the legitimacy of these roles. We have accreditations, which are basically experiential and education-based recognition of people's qualifications. I think we have roughly 70 of the leading law firm, pricing professionals who have received the accreditation. I don't know about you all, but I think we've reached somewhat, we're not quite at a saturation point, but the market is fairly well saturated. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I would venture to guess that at least half of the AmLaw 200, has either a chief or director or somebody heading up legal pricing, in a very outward-facing way. So I would expect to see full saturation at some point here in, in the next few years in that regard.
Same with legal project management. I think that it's a little less tangible at times than pricing. I think the pricing is much easier to understand for the uninitiated, and there are challenges in terms of implementing it and getting people to change their habits and practices. But I think that the clients and the industry are going to take every firm, they're going to take every firm into that world. I would only expect to see these professions grow. I would expect to see the folks that are performing these services within law firms to really have all of the qualifications and experience. We're seeing people move from firm to firm and starting as somebody that's maybe a manager or analyst at one firm, that stood up a function, moving to another firm after growing their skill set, moving to another firm and standing up a brand new function. It's almost, it's like this viral momentum that we're seeing. And I think it's all, again, driven by clients in the industry and the market forces that we're seeing. So, not a very provocative prediction, but I think, I'm pretty confident that we'll continue to see that growth.
Aurelia Spivey
Thank you. I think thoughtful is better than provocative. So that's good to hear. Steve, I'd love to hear from you.
Steven Manton
I'm going to put on the crystal ball hat, I think, for this one. I think we're at a very interesting, I don't know what you call it, I wouldn't call it a crossroads. I don't know whether you call it a wave or
James Shoemaker
An intersection, Steve. That's the word, right?
Steven Manton
We've covered a very interesting, thank you, intersection. Thank you, Jim. Where there are if you take the various functions and skill sets that it takes to run a successful law firm and it takes now to run successful in-house legal functions, which are some, in many cases bigger than a lot of law firms. There's a new breed of business, of law skill sets needed and business of law experts. And I think you're going to see them coming out of these innovative functions. The pricing, legal project management, and client relationship management. And I think these functions are going to come to the forefront of the legal sector, and you're going to get a new breed of professionalization at the very leadership, at the very top of this, of this forefront, you're going to get a true business of law experts coming out. Who actually understand, not only how to manage profitability in a law firm, but know how to manage, how to drive practice group change, but also understand how to sit down with a client and have a conversation about the relationship and how to grow that relationship.
So you're going to get these people sitting right in the middle and they're going to be sitting at the forefront of the law firm, but they're also going to have one foot in the client relationship management side. They're going to bring huge amounts of value, I think, to not only the law firms but also to the external client relationship and vice versa. I think eventually what you're going to have, are these businesses of law professionals, being much more leading and managing relationships. Yes, it's still going to be a relationship driven by the partners, absolutely. But we are entering an era where business is becoming extremely competitive. We've got technologies coming into play that are changing the legal landscape. We've got new skill sets coming into play, and it's an evolving industry where these professionals are really now going to be taking the lead in really helping their law firms, helping their partners, and helping the clients achieve value as well, at the same time.
Aurelia Spivey
Fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. We've talked a lot about the conference and what I'd love to do is, I will put a link to the program, in the show notes, so people can really dig in. Is there anything we haven't covered, Jim, that you think would be good for listeners to hear about?
James Shoemaker
I think one of the unique things about Intersect in prior years, is the effort that the organizers of the conference put forth in terms of really cultivating the community. That's one of the core values of TVPI is community. And in that regard, our effort is really focused around creating a home for these business professionals. Working in law firms where there really hasn't been one that, the home hasn't existed for those folks, because to some degree the roles have been largely mason or new. I think we've done a pretty good job of creating that community and bringing those folks together from various parts of the country and the world quite frankly. So when we organize our events, we're very thoughtful and deliberate about how we come at it from that angle, because we only get together so many times, throughout the course of the year. So the programming was very rich in terms of networking and fellowship opportunities.
Steven Manton
I think that what we've created is this really close-knit community environment. We sat down with people who are first-timers at Intersect 2020, and we said to them, how did it feel walking into a room or a space or this sort of gathering and you don't know anyone? And they said they'd never been made to feel so welcome. People would recognize, they would see that they're new and just come up, shake their hand, come over here, talk to us, let me introduce to all these people. Sort of shepherd them in and get them involved in the community very quickly. There was no one because you walk into a room and you don't know anyone, the first few minutes it's, how's it going to be. And they said it was just amazing that the atmosphere was created. So, if you are new to us and you're new to I Intersect 2020, you get immersed into it very quickly, very rapidly.
One of our mottos is if people come to Intersect 2020 as a stranger and leave as a friend. And that's very much how its, and people will continue those relationships hopefully throughout their entire careers that they make while meeting with us and also developing skills and learnings from some of the top educators and professionals in the world
Aurelia Spivey
Well, thank you both for sharing that. It's, I love the fact that you mentioned, that walking into a room, it can be so intimidating. So it's great to have a community that welcomes you in. And thank you both for being on the show today. I think our listeners are going to learn a lot and I've really enjoyed this conversation.
Steven Manton
Yeah, thank you very much. Really appreciate being on, and being invited to talk with you.
James Shoemaker
Yes, thank you, Aurelia, very much appreciated it.
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.
BigHand Impact Analytics combines strategic advice and change management expertise with AI-enabled data analytics to transform legal billing data into DEI success. The solution allows firms to identify opportunities for career advancing work, supports DEI initiatives, and focuses on areas where time recording needs to be improved - ultimately creating a smoother billing and collection process, with better data insights.
© 2024 BigHand. All Rights Reserved. Various trademarks held by their respective owners.
