Aurelia Spivey, Marketing Consultant with BigHand, chats with Toby Brown, Perkins Coie’s Chief Practice Management Officer. Toby leads the firm’s revenue management and efficiency programs, legal project management, pricing, process improvement, practice innovation, alternative staffing, and new partner integration. Toby has more than a decade of experience in practice management and pricing with Am Law firms and is the former director of the Utah State Bar.
Toby is an active member and leader in organizations devoted to legal knowledge management, and he speaks to national audiences on legal pricing, alternative fee arrangements, and other law firm financial management issues. He is the founder of the Legal Marketing Association’s annual P3 Conference, which brings together more than 400 pricing, project management, and process improvement experts in the legal profession. Toby also co-founded the “3 Geeks and a Law” blog and co-authored the book, Law Firm Pricing: Strategies, Roles and Responsibilities.
Top three takeaways from this episode
The people who come to pricing are the rainmakers, therefore they are the power people in the firm.
Podcast Transcript:
Toby Brown
It's never boring. I will say that. It comes at you fast, but you learn so much every day. I mean, I can't imagine having one of the more traditional, well-calm, calcified positions at a firm or a company where you're just doing the same thing every day, so I love what I do.
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.
Aurelia Spivey
Good morning. Our guest today is Toby Brown. He's the Chief Practice Management Officer at Perkins Coie, Toby, thanks for joining us.
Toby Brown
Very nice to be here.
Aurelia Spivey
So, Tony, I think it's always helpful for our listeners to hear a little bit about your background and how you found your way to legal pricing. So, let's take some time now and tell us a little bit about your journey.
Toby Brown
Happy to do that. You have to set the way back machine to I think, I want to say, 11 years ago, maybe 12. Somewhere in that range. I was head of knowledge management at was then Fulbright & Jaworski, and I was giving a presentation to leadership. This would have been probably 11 years ago because it was around the time of the Lehman collapse, so 2008, mid-2008. But I was giving a presentation to leadership, and this was a Tuesday morning about how knowledge management was going to become mission critical because of alternative fee arrangements, as it was called back then. And I put up a quote from the General Counsel of Conocophillips and it basically said, if you're thinking about asking for a rate increase, don't bother. And if you've already asked for one, we changed our mind. So, at the end of that meeting presentation, the two partners ran up to me and said, What do you know about alternative fee arrangements? And I said, well, I've studied them for years, I'd written articles on them and stuff like that. And I said, here's, here's the basic thinking on them. And they said, can you come with us on Friday morning to meet with a client? I said, Sure. So, what that resulted in was I was thrown in front of a client negotiated, it was a whole back success fee, which ended up working out well, we won the success fee. And after that, this black hole formed because word got out that I could help with alternative fee arrangements. I formalized an alternative fee arrangement program for Fulbright, where there were four partners on the committee. I had to figure it out from scratch, figure out profitability, and all these other things. So just build it up from there and I moved firms a few times and ended up getting a chief role and my role expanded. So, I oversee much more than pricing today. But that's still at the core of what I focus on.
Aurelia Spivey
That's a great story. And I think it's helpful for people to hear, do you think there are still opportunities at law firms to be that proactive as you were at that time?
Toby Brown
So there are absolutely opportunities within many firms, especially if you move down the market into the amla 200. And the midsize firms, every firm needs this. So, if your firm doesn't have it, raise your hand. So absolutely, I think there's an opportunity.
Aurelia Spivey
Fantastic. And I want to get a little bit more into that later about the pricing skill set. But what I wanted to talk about first was at the clock this year, Justin Ergler, who is at GSK, and is the Director of Alternative Fee Intelligence and Analytics. He was there and he gave a real big shout-out to the P3 Conference, which I know is coming up next year, and there's just been a call for contributions that he said it was a really important conference for clients to attend. So, I know that you've been involved with that conference and I would like to get your perspective on what you think the client side could learn from attending that conference.
Toby Brown
Absolutely, and I now owe Justin a beer or bourbon. Justin is a good friend. And truth in advertising I am actually the founder of P3 so I'm not unbiased. However, that being said, in fact, we talked about what we call sort of the P3 community, we maintain relationships with the clock community. But a core message amongst all that is we should really be working together. So, clients coming to P3 and participating in P3, a lot of times I met with a client last Friday went on site with them, they tend to say, why aren't law firms doing XY and Z. And one of the pieces of advice I usually give them is to say, ask your law firms if they have a pricing person. And if they say yes, say you would like the pricing person involved in the dialogue between you and the firm, because the pricing person is there to make sure everybody wins. And so, for a client, participating in P3 will give you a much deeper view into what law firms are doing and how law firms can be better partners for you.
Aurelia Spivey
Fantastic, I agree. I wanted to talk as well about the industry as a whole. And I've read the 2019 pm monitor survey. And that was very positive about the growing elevation of pricing rules at law firms. And I'd love to hear from you about some practical ways that you've seen the pricing function make an impact on the business of law.
Toby Brown
Certainly, and this will sound, I don't know if it will sound odd, I guess it depends on a portion of the audience listening. Probably the biggest impact pricing functions have on law firms is shifting the transparency and awareness around profitability. Now I talked about when I first became a pricing director years ago, at Fulbright, I remember digging deep into the profitability thing. Once I dug down the layers, I'm like, oh, this makes sense to manage really not that complicated. But I started talking with partners about it. And they're like, oh, I didn't know that. You know, the first one, I thought because it was a younger partner, I thought that it was just him. And by the third and fourth partners, I was like, wait a minute, these people don't understand what makes their business profitable. And so typically pricing people take on this profitability evangelizing role. Because when a partner lawyer comes to the pricing person for help on a matter or client or whatever type of engagement. It's yeah, we want to win the work, but we want to win the work in a profitable way and historically, the metric for law firms and partners has been what's the realization, and that is, that is a factor in profitability. But there are other factors, even leverage is far more powerful in terms of profitability. So, the partners just always took realization as a proxy for profitability. So, the pricing role is like, No, you need to, you need to take a little deeper look at this. And so, in terms of a big impact, that's, that's in my experience, where repricing person I've talked to or dealt with, they end up playing a central role around that.
Aurelia Spivey
I think leading on from that. My next question is around the lawyer engagement piece. So, what I'd love to hear from you is how you've got lawyers engaged with pricing, perhaps at different firms, or perhaps you have a methodology that you've taken with you. Because I think that's something that can still be a challenge for some teams.
Toby Brown
It's kind of funny, you mentioned that. Nowadays, so we have a robust pricing team here at Perkins Coie. That being said, and then we've only recently also fully fleshed it out, but even now, they are slammed. And before, when, before we'd gotten the staffing up to where it is now, my pricing director was basically telling me to keep my mouth shut because every time I would go to an office and talk to partners about pricing, all of a sudden, the request to pricing would spike. And so initially, I would say, if you sort of dial back the maturity model, one thing most pricing people have found is that there is a kind of call it a natural evolution, the people who need you and are willing to leverage you are the ones that reach out to you. I mean, even, 11 plus years ago at Fulbright, as soon as people found out about me, I didn't have to advertise, they were just like, oh, this guy can help you, this guy can talk to clients, please call him. And it really wasn't that hard. A lot of it because I've done this, a few firms are like, Oh, you need to get out this, this needs to be a service for everyone, all the partners, and my reaction is, well, not all of the partners are willing or able to leverage this tool and so having a busy pricing team spend their time trying to get partners who aren't going to use this service engaged is not the best use of their time.
Aurelia Spivey
One thing I'd like to sort of dig into a little deeper, is in terms of the characteristics of the partners and lawyers, that you really understand it and are able to leverage it. Because there are some that perhaps just aren't able to use that service or to at this time. So, what are the characteristics? Do you think that that makes people more amenable to pricing?
Toby Brown
Well, typically, it's the rainmakers that come to you. So it's those who basically, are on that side of the business, get it, understand it, and realize, because you, you've read the surveys, more and more clients are saying, we want to hear about alternative fees, we want to know what you can do, how you can do it, what sort of resources do you have around it. So, the rainmakers, at a firm, they're listening and hearing clients say that, and so they're coming back saying, okay, I absolutely have to go to the pricing people and get them involved. So typically, it's that kind of lawyer, it's not your service partner, or I'll say, like a litigator who's being fed work by business lawyers. It's those that are very much on the I'll call it the sales side of the firm.
Aurelia Spivey
Yeah, sort of out there speaking with the clients. So we are going to go with you have got people engaged and what I'd like to talk a bit more about is the process in terms of once you've got them engaged, and talk about scope, and what role that plays in your pricing, and how you get busy people who, we are hearing they are engaged, but they're still busy to sort of pause and, work with your team on the scoping aspect of the pricing.
Toby Brown
I would say this is a very, very big issue, and borrowing a phrase from my boss, it's a muscle that lawyers don't know they have, nor do they know how to use it. And when you press them because I've done this over and over and over again, they'll push back and they say, well, you're the expert on this, you should know how to do this. And the pushback from the pricing person is, okay, we have expertise in pricing and profitability, you have expertise in M&A work or patent litigation, or regulatory, whatever it is, you actually know what the scope is. So then once you get them to that point, they'll flip around, and then they'll say, well, there are hundreds of things that will have an impact. And what I usually do is where I walk them through the processes, I say, okay, let's start with what do you think the number is, and I'll use 100 grand to keep the math easy. They'll say, well 100 grand, and I say, well, let's just start with the big things, what are the big things that will change scope? When I walk them through that I rarely get to 10 of those before, I basically am able to say, look, I think you've identified all the big things, yes, there are little things like a deposition might get rescheduled or something like that but that's not really going to move this needle that much, and they agree. So, basically, they already know the scope, but they've never walked through the process of laying it out. Even to this day, even in a mature model, which is a significant challenge with a partner, to get them to think about that and say, oh, here, and in this case, and I will tell you what the two biggest factors always are, it's opposing party and opposing counsel. It doesn't matter if it's litigation or regulatory or transactional. If like, for instance, and transactional, if you have an unsophisticated party on the other side of a deal, an FMA deal, they're going to ask a lot more questions than a sophisticated party would. So there's, those are two big ones and so once you tease those out, you have the sort of corollary and follow on to this is even I'll say more challenging and I would say not a lot of firms models have matured to this level is what do you do when scoping changes? The story I use and it's kind of funny, I will say that I did this with that client on Friday. How many of you know who Chip and Joanna Gaines are and all of the women in the room will always raise their hands and the men will look out at me kind of dumbfounded and I don't know if you know who Chip and Joanna Gaines are there. They have a well-known show on HGTV called Fixer Upper. They're a really cute couple. My wife watches it, and I happen to sit down and watch it too and I actually enjoy it. I will admit that not my masculinity in a way, but when they crack open a wall and there's asbestos, they don't just go oh, and keep working, and then, later on, tell the client, oh, we found asbestos. They're like, everybody stop, put your hammers down, we got to call the client. That is, again, not a muscle lawyers are used to so when scope changes, they might say, oh, there was some more discovery and then in three months, when the bill hits the client, the client goes, what's going on? Like, they'll say, well, back in, in November, we told you that there was more discovery, but they didn't actually sit down and say, okay, this changing the scope, it will have an impact on the price, all those sorts of things. So not only scoping but monitoring changes in scope. Those are big, big things that lawyers are just starting to figure out.
Aurelia Spivey
And how do you, if you identify that, alongside them, and you're brought into the conversation, how do you coach them to address it sooner? Because we've all heard that story of three months later the bill comes to the client. How do you preempt that with your lawyers?
Toby Brown
Yeah, well, I'll give you two sides, kind of the pricing side, or I'll call the profitability side. And then the legal project management side. Legal project management is an emerging and fast-growing role and in many firms including ours, it's either adjacent or tied to pricing. Because the pricing people work it out up front, when the scope changes, the pricing, people are not in the room. So at Perkins for major engagements, we are now assigning legal project management resources, and they're the ones that go timeout, our scope has changed. So that's, that's an emerging role and basically a resource to help lawyers identify when the scope has changed. Now otherwise, like if you're just pure pricing, and you don't have a legal project management role, what ends up happening is that three months thing happens. And then the partner is like, oh, we need to write down $20,000. I'm using my 100, grand thing. A significant number, and we're like, what's going on? Well, the client wasn't aware of this or was over budget. So what tends to happen then is like then the pricing people because a number of pricing people, in fact on our side we are involved, in my prior firm we were very involved in the write-down and write-off process. So we're aware of it and saying, hey, wait a minute, you keep asking to approve these things that go out of scope and we do have to do write-downs, you need to change. So part of that evangelizing about profitability is also putting the partners on notice that they're no longer operating in the dark, that there's a lot more transparency, there's a bright light shining on what they're doing. And so, I hate to say it this way, but it's a fear-based thing. It's like, oh, but if I don't stay on top of this everyone is going to notice. It used to be everyone just go, oh, I guess we have to do the write-down, but nowadays, everyone's gone, wait a minute, why is this a repeat problem here? So the call the fear side is another way of solving the problem. But that's after the fact. So you're going to take some financial hits.
Aurelia Spivey
What I also wanted to talk about was vague RFPs. I think RFPs are getting better. I think procurement teams are helping in that process. But I think there are still vague RFPs how do you how do you deal with that?
Toby Brown
Good question, and also one of those things that's evolving. I always recommend to the lawyers, and I would say they're getting better or more open to this, but I say, let's go back and ask. And they're like, oh, well, if we ask them it'll sound like we don't know what we're doing. I'm like, no, actually the client will appreciate that we have put some thought into this and come back with some thoughtful questions. I said, so let's go ask the question. Because if the client wants a hard price on something, if it's vague, basically, we're going to give them either a high number or a vague number to say, it's $100,000, but can be a lot more, could be a lot less. I said, they're not really asking for that. So let's go back and ask them. So think about partners and lawyers at firms, scoping is a muscle they've never used. The same thing on the client side, think about all the in-house lawyers, they came from large firms, and they've never done this. I shouldn't say never far and away most of them have never done this. So when, of course, an RFP is going to be vague, it's not going to come out with a clean, crisp, here's the scope of what we're looking for, give us a number. So part of this is an opportunity to engage with the client and help them be better at it and do it with them. I actually see it as an opportunity but too often, a lot of partners will react and just say well, we just need to give them a number. You know, a lot of firms will just throw the, I call it throwing the dart in the dark and hoping they even hit the wall with the dartboard is on. So there are a lot of big RFPs out there. I'll say that.
Aurelia Spivey
Yeah. And do you have an example, where the client has welcome to that? I think it'll be helpful for people to hear an example if you have one.
Toby Brown
Oh, yeah. This was on a litigation, where it was basically to take on all their sort of either litigation coordinating council nationally. And they had sent around a spreadsheet showing this is what we did last year, so give us a number then. So I said, well, we should ask them trends in what they're seeing, each of these categories are going to call it subtypes of litigation, do they expect them to be going up or down? And do they expect to see more complex or less complex litigation in the coming year? And, basically, the client replied with, oh, we hadn't thought about that, that's a great idea, we are going to share this with all firms. So it actually improved the whole process for the client and made it easier for the firm to bid on the work.
Aurelia Spivey
And I think that's a great story. And it's a great, just reminder for everyone. And it kind of brings me to my next question, corporate legal teams, the legal ops, procurement teams. You talked at the beginning, about the relationships that you're building with them, and that they're asking to speak to someone in the pricing team. So tell us a little bit more about how you engage with clients in the pricing process.
Toby Brown
I actually see this, I call my highest value function at the firm. In those conversations, what I'm trying to do is get the client to surface their pain, which is to say, one of my go-to questions is okay, at the end of this engagement, or the end of your fiscal year, what is going to make you look good to your boss, or bosses when it comes to the financial side of this? Because you would think, Oh, I have to save money. Well, yes and no. I gave you an example, the client that needed to have, are the clients a lot of times, a no-surprise rule. That's, that's a pretty big one, and generally common, but not always. So you have to pull out from the client, what are their real goals, and then that, that instructs the pricing person to say, okay, here are the types of alternative fees, if any, that we should be proposing to this client because it addresses those core issues, it will make them look good to their boss, or to their leadership, or whatever form. So that's why I say it's my highest function. With the clients, once they're like, oh, you actually care and you want to know about my pain, they will share it with you, and it's super valuable information.
Aurelia Spivey
What I'd like to do is dig in a little bit deeper without revealing too much information. What are the most common goals that you are seeing? So you'll top three goals that you when you start having those conversations.
Toby Brown
They will say cost savings, but what they really mean is they need to somehow demonstrate to their bosses that they're basically good stewards of the legal spending. And so what happens many times is, and you've probably heard this, where clients will ask for fixed fees or whatever type of fee arrangement and then they will revert to a discount. The reason is, we've talked about it, they don't have all the skills to really scope and do stuff like that. So that's really hard for them. And it's really easy for them to go back to their boss and say, we're getting an X percent discount from our firms, and that demonstrates they're a good steward of legal spending. Now, does it actually make them a good steward of legal spin? I would argue, probably not. But it's a great and easy way for them to go tell a story that sound makes it sound like they are. So that's a whole, it's not really about saving money. It's more about I have to be careful how I say that. Yes, it is about saving money, but it's just much more about demonstrating that they're saving money. But I'll give you an odd counter-example, and this is from a prior firm about six years ago, where I'd gone to one of these clients because they were like, okay, we've been commanded to cutting 10% out of their budget. So I went back and said, look, if we staff if we use alternative staffing on your M&A deals, we can reduce the cost, and I demonstrated it very clearly with a spreadsheet, we can reduce the cost per transaction by 10%. And they said no. And I said, why? And they said, well, we're, so this goes to maybe the second issue, is they're all also very worried about the quality. Think about it, lawyers are risk averse. So if they went in and said, oh, I save 10%, but we're using lower quality lawyers, they're really hesitant to say, they will do that. I'll say that's changing today but back then it was like, no, no, no, no. So you think, oh, this is a clear cost saving demonstrating it was like, no, no. In fact, ultimately, what that client told me, this guy's name was Bob, that well, what I've come to determine is that rates in the middle of the country are lower than on the coasts. And I'm like, yeah, I could have told you that quite a while ago. And he goes, well, we're going to start shifting work to those firms. And I'm and there's obviously different sophistication among clients or different levels of maturity with their legal departments. There's a lot of chaos out there, they're trying to figure this out. But if that takes me back to opportunity, we pricing people are a great resource to sort of partner and create a partnership between clients and law firms to address those concerns.
Aurelia Spivey
My next question is sort of drawing on this around alternative fees. And I think, I don't want to get into the alternative fees and billable hours is it going to go away debate, but I think we can focus on if you're seeing an alternative fee. Are you seeing them in specific practice areas? What is your experience of what they are right now? Because they're also revolving and alternative fees are also a wide definition, so feel free to use the terminology that you think would help to answer this question best.
Toby Brown
Well, this is actually a good question. Again, I want to set the way back machine to the layman's collapse. There, in fact, I still remember very vividly because we were at Fulbright, they had an active patent litigation practice and pretty much watched the price of patent litigation. You know, I'll just say, some standardized scope, I'll call it to go from $5 million to $1.5 million, in about 18 months. And I and everyone's like, oh, where's alternative fees happening, and at the time, it was patent litigation, then it shifted abroad more broadly to litigation, and then about three or four years ago, all of a sudden shifted hard to the transactional side and the regulatory side. So nowadays, I see alternative fees, very broadly applied to all different types of practices and all kinds of situations. Now, if part of the question is where do they work better or less well? I used to have, I came up with this, I have all my little funny sayings, my golden rules. And one I have actually that I developed a Fulbright was, people would ask me pretty much the same question, but they would, they would, the way they would ask it is, how can you tell if it's going to be a good alternative fee arrangement? Which would mean a win-win one. And I basically would say, oh, that's easy, I have caller ID. This was to say, in fact, there was a partner at my last firm, where he would call me because I have approval authority, he would call me to sort of talk through what he wanted to do to get it approved. And basically, at one point in our developing relationship, I just said, look, is his name is Elliot, I just said, look, Elliot, you have figured this out; I really am not worried about anything you proposed, but I love when you call me because I get to learn what you're doing, where you are, and how you're evolving and stuff like that. So frankly, when the phone rang and the caller ID showed it was him, 99.9% chance I was going to say yes. Whereas someone else would call me and I know they don't manage against fees well, they always underbid things trying to win work, they always overstaffed them, or they have really bad leverage, then that was a far different story. So it's actually more about the people and the relationship. So, a partner who gets this a trusting relationship with a client, that is going to be a successful alternative fee arrangement. I can just tell you all the time, that's a very, you never say always or never, but I would say in my experience, every time that that formula is there, it's a success. That can be applied to litigation or transactional or regulatory. Just to give you an idea. Well, let me take one step back, there are certain advantages to different types of practices, on an M&A deal, you have a well-defined deadline in terms of setting the scope and a price, and that's gold. But in litigation, you can set artificial deadlines, you can say, look, we'll give you a number for the next three or six months because we have a pretty good idea of what the activity is going to be in this case and it can easily be a large multi-year case, but we'd say we have a pretty good idea what's going to happen the next three months, we'll give you a fixed monthly fee. So you can create those deadlines otherwise. On another end of the spectrum, this is one of my favorite alternative fees, it's just general advice and counsel. People say, oh, there's no way because you never know what you're going to get. And like I said, this is one of my favorites, where I will go to a client and say, look, let's define the topics, under general advice and counsel and say, for argument's sake, we came up with four of them. Okay, you can call us anytime you want, with any type of questions that are just general advice and counsel, it will be a six monthly fee, and I'm making this up for math again, $10,000 every three or six or nine months, whatever, we decide. We will sit down and talk about how it's going and the volume of requests and we will mutually agree to make adjustments to that number. So those have been very successful alternative fees and there's almost no scope there other than to say it's these four types of law that are included. The lawyers are involved in the level of trust and openness in the relationship that will drive success. But I just see them being applied in almost any sphere.
Aurelia Spivey
I think that's a really interesting perspective and some great examples, as well. So, I think that it would be really helpful for people to rethink perhaps the box that we've put alternative fees in as well. So, I'm going to shift gears now and I think given you've been at a number of firms, you've grown in different teams, I'd really like to talk about your pricing teams and some of the skills that are required for this role. But first I'd like to talk about the different sizes of teams, and I think we know the average is around two to three people, at the majority of firms. So, with a team of that size, what do you feel they should be prioritizing to be as successful as they can be?
Toby Brown
Well, I have a whole bunch of thoughts wrapped up in this answer so I'll probably bounce around and feel free to bring me back on point. With my teams, not just my pricing team, but all my teams, I basically say well there's sort of the golden brass ring out there that is really client satisfaction. But putting that out as a necessary situation, the next two things that you always should be focused on are revenue and margin. So, whatever you're doing needs to drive those two numbers. So in terms of skills and sort of form, and I'll say depending on how you define the team. If I count myself on our pricing team, I think we have seven, and like I said we're probably going to have to grow that because of the volume of requests we are getting, but okay what sort of skill sets amongst that group, well the obvious one is financial. So if you're more on the junior side of the team, you're really going to be digging in pulling, working with finance, pulling the numbers, massaging them, putting them together in a way that they're easy to communicate to a partner and eventually a client. Always be thinking about what we can do to improve the margins on it and even what can we do to reduce the number and maintain the quality and those sorts of things. So there's a sort of operational financial set of skills that are very very important. I alluded to and I'll move this up so sort of like call the manager and then to the director level. I alluded to the need to be able to communicate this. Once you have a role that is more partner facing you definitely need a skill set of communication and it's not just being able to communicate, it's being a good communicator. It's being able to take financial concepts and boil them down and communicate them in a very simple, actionable fashion. And actionable are very important word there because you can say, oh, you know, if we do this we'll have a, I'm making this up again, 20% margin which obviously is very dependent on your profit methodology. So a 20% margin but if we do a couple of these changes it could be a 25% margin. They have to really be able to go in and say here is the impact of those changes and communicate why. So the communication skill, basically making the complex simple, I think is a priority skill. at the very, well I'm going to say, at the top, I'll call these operational skills but then I'm going to add one more. It's being someone who is, I'll call it, an active listener. So that when they talk to people, they're not just trying to convey ideas, they're trying to draw out the needs and the wants of that person, be it the partner or the client. So, it's a skill, communication is presenting ideas, but this is, I will call it, extracting ideas. That's a big thing, a very big and high-value thing, and I would put that at the director and at the chief level.
Aurelia Spivey
You know we've talked a little bit about this but I just wanted to probe and see if there's anything else that you want to add to this question, which is one of the greatest challenges facing pricing professionals and how are you overcoming them or how could someone in this profession overcome them?
Toby Brown
I would actually guess that most pricing teams at law firms are just overwhelmed. And so part of the challenge is getting adequate resources from the firm in order to address this but it's one of those, in my opinion, very easy sells because like this is directly tied to revenue and margin. I mean it's not like we're upgrading our e-mail system. This is not an expense, this is an absolute investment in your business. What I would suggest, if you are in those roles, is to take it back to the fact that the people who come to pricing are the rainmakers, therefore they are the power people in the firm. So go to those people and say, hey, look we are providing all this value to you and we want to keep doing that but we are being overwhelmed and we could use some support from you with leadership, for garnering more resources. And trust me if you got a power partner with a big book of business highly dependent on the pricing team, they're going to stand up because they don't want to lose that resource because it's being diluted.
Aurelia Spivey
So this has been a super conversation and what I wanted to do is wrap it up with a question. We are on the Pricing Matters podcast, so I want to know from you Toby, why does pricing matter to you?
Toby Brown
That's a great place to end up. Pricing, I kind of told you that when I first got into this, I did one pricing deal and this black hole formed it just sucked me into it. It's been the best thing that ever happened to me in the legal industry. I've been in the legal industry for all of my professional adult life and this one changed everything. And it's not just pricing but pricing opens up the conversation in new and different ways. Pricing is like the catalyst for all of their, maybe all the change conversations going on at law firms. Now even AI, it's like why do we need AI; well it's to lower the cost of delivery. All of that starts with the pricing conversation. So that pricing catalyst, call it the tip of the sword, it's like opening up doors for change and new ideas, and ways to better serve clients. So in some respects, I was lucky the way I got into this but in the other respects was the door opened a little bit and I kicked it hard because I was like this interesting and I'm going to pursue this. So when people come to me and say, I'm thinking about doing this, I say, go kick that door open, and frankly, your firm needs it. It's never boring, I will say that. It comes at you fast but you learn so much every day. I mean I can't imagine having one of the more traditional columns calcified positions that the firm or company where you just doing the same thing every day. So I love what I do.
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.
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