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

Aurelia Spivey, Marketing Consultant with BigHand, chats with Linda Novosel, Chief Innovation & Value Officer with Blank Rome, and Sharon Scenna, formally the Director of Client Value with Blank Rome. 

Linda is responsible for driving the development of creative approaches to enhancing value and client service. Linda collaborates with Blank Rome’s attorneys and clients on designing customized service solutions that are cost-effective and efficient through a combination of people, process, and technology. In addition, Linda oversees strategic pricing and client value, practice innovation, data analytics, legal project management, and process improvement.

Linda has more than 30 years of experience in the legal industry and has held senior management positions at several other Am Law 100 firms where she was responsible for practice management, strategic pricing, legal project management, e-discovery, attorney and non-attorney staffing, contract attorney programs, and process improvement.

A former practicing lawyer, Linda received her J.D., cum laude, from Widener University School of Law where she served as an editor of the Widener Journal of Public Law and was a member of the Moot Court Honor Society. She earned her B.A. in International Relations from Bucknell University.

Sharon is currently the Senior Solutions Management Director with Intapp. She collaborates with clients, attorneys, and firm leadership on value and innovation efforts that enhance relationships. Sharon develops pricing structures that address mutual needs and strategies to help clients manage their legal budgets. She advises on rate and compensation models, hourly rates, evaluating new business opportunities, and client retention plans. Sharon is a key member of the innovation team that leverages a combination of people, process, and technology to provide cost-effective and efficient solutions.

Sharon has over 20 years of experience in the legal industry including serving as Director of Practice Management where she advised department heads and practice group leaders on business planning, revenue and expense management, paralegal and attorney staffing needs, and coordinated with various administrative departments. As Director of Business Development, Sharon oversaw the marketing and business development team, launched client team programs, and led the successful implementation of CRM.

Sharon earned an MBA from LaSalle University and a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from King’s College.

Top three takeaways from this episode

• Innovation is better together. Innovation programs that encourage working in teams bring diverse ideas, creativity, and deliver better solutions.

• Help your clients shine. How can you help your legal department show they are not just a cost center but really providing an impact on the company’s bottom line?

• Leverage your data. Data is critically important to managing any pricing arrangement and providing transparency both internally and externally.

Pricing allows us to have a relationship that is built on mutual trust.

Podcast Transcript:

Linda Novosel 
And so it's really fun to do the analysis around how we can better come up with solutions that work for both the client and the law firm.

Sharon Scenna 
Pricing gives us the opportunity to really partner with clients to help address their business needs.

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. 

Our guests this morning are Linda Novosel, who serves as Blank Rome’s Chief Innovation & Value Officer, and Sharon Scenna, who is the Director of Client Value at Blank Rome, as well. Good morning. Welcome to the podcast.

Linda Novosel 
Thanks so much. Thanks for having us.

Aurelia Spivey 
You are most welcome, and I really appreciate you taking the time to join us on the podcast. We're going to talk about your client value innovation at your firm and we will of course touch on the fact that we are in the COVID-19 situation. So, we will make sure that we bring that in for our guests as relevant. But I really did want to focus on you know, all the work that you've been doing up until now, which has hopefully been making it easier for you and your teams to manage through this crisis. So where I'd love to start is just a little bit about your background. So I'm going to ask you, Linda, to tell us a bit about your journey.

Linda Novosel 
When I graduated from law school, many years ago, I took the traditional lawyer path and get a clerkship with a judge and then went into private practice. But after about eight years, I migrated into the business side of law firms, particularly to law 100 firm. So I played the role of Practice Group Director that taught me all the underlying business requirements of how to run a practice. Then I migrated into LPM and pricing and eventually took on a role as the Chief Client Value Officer of an Am Law 100 firm, and then on to Blank Rome as the Chief Innovation & Value Officer, where I oversee, not just pricing and LPM, but innovation as well. 

Sharon Scenna 
This is Sharon and my background is about 25 years of experience in the legal industry. So my focus in legal began in the marketing and business development space, where I really focused on enhancing client relationships and building a brand, as well as securing new business. And then I moved into practice management after I had worked on my MBA in marketing. In practice management, I worked really closely with our leadership team on business planning and the overall practice group strategy. And that strategy included revenue and expense forecasting, and I also was involved in staffing and looking at practice efficiencies. Then I was asked to move into pricing, which really was a great synergy into the pricing space. Where I focus on client relationships through repricing strategies and also fostering a culture of the firm that embraces alternative fee arrangements.

Aurelia Spivey 
Linda, one of the reasons I really wanted to bring you on the podcast and hear from your firm is innovation. There's a lot of talk in the market at the moment about innovation in the legal space, but I'd love for you to tell us what does innovation mean at Blank Rome?

Linda Novosel 
Innovation is a really broad term and it probably is one that is overused. Although it's in my title, innovation is really about creating new solutions for enhancing service delivery. At Blank Rome, we define it as very broad in terms of including people, process, technology, and data and combining those one or all four of them or two of them to really come up with solutions that drive value for our clients.

Aurelia Spivey 
You recently ran an innovation challenge. So can you tell us a bit about the goals and the outcomes of that challenge?

Linda Novosel 
Our goal with the innovation challenge was to introduce the concept of innovation to all stakeholders in the firm and to get them comfortable with defining it in a way that they could see concrete solutions that would enhance value for our clients. So before we kicked off our innovation challenge, we did a roadshow and went to every single law office and did a presentation about what does innovation look like. And while we didn't want to give ideas about what that innovation should look like, we gave them examples of things that we had seen in the past that had been innovative. So it got people to thinking, Okay, how do I do my job today, and how could I do my job better through the use of these, these three pillars, which are the people, process, technology, and of course, data, which underlies all of those are those three areas. Our objectives were met and we were really excited because we had expected to have maybe 20 people who participated in the challenge. We've received 103 submissions, and the submissions were really creative, they were outside-the-box thinking, and they allowed us to really appreciate that our people, our employees, were always thinking about how to better improve our service. So it was, it was a lot of work, we had to review 103 submissions and narrow it down to nine finalists. The finalists then did a presentation, which was broadcast firm-wide, and was really exciting, and then we broadcast the award of the winners. We actually had three categories, so there was a winner in each category. And then we recently kicked off our second challenge. So we are now in the process of not only implementing the solutions that won the first innovation challenge, but we are now in the process of kicking off the second one, which will lead us towards the end of the year when we'll go through the same process again.

Aurelia Spivey 
Excellence, something I thought about while you were speaking was, what were the key lessons you learned from your first challenge, and are you using them as you're going into the second process?

Linda Novosel 
So one of the key lessons that we learned was that we didn't leave enough time to evaluate the submissions. We thought again, that we didn't expect to receive 103 submissions, we were really excited that we received as many as we did and that the submissions that we received for really well thought out. So we learned that people are hungry for this change. As we go into the second one, we've actually built in some additional time to review. So last year, we probably spent about a full week reviewing the submissions before the actual presentation day. This year, we're going to leave ourselves about a month. We also learned that a lot of the innovative solutions that were submitted, were internally focused, and we wanted people to work more on solutions that could be externally focused.

Well, we did see some that were externally focused, but the majority of them were internally focused. And I think that innovation internally is important. If we're going to say to our clients, we're going to deliver services to you in an innovative way. But we really want to be sure that whatever solutions we do implement are going to benefit our client. 

Sharon Scenna 
If I could add to that, I would say we also learned that many people had very similar ideas. And going forward, we really encourage people to work together. We find that innovation is often flushed out better when you have more than one person coming to the table with the idea. We definitely found that collaborating together and having many heads together around a problem creates a more well-thought-out and rounded solution.

Linda Novosel 
We really want in our second challenge to have more people working together as teams. Two of our finalists were actually teams but we, I think, probably only had about four or five teams that submitted. We're really hoping that more of the submissions are going to be from teams. We toyed with the idea of making that mandatory but after thinking through the viability of people who are all working remotely and the challenge of trying to get them working as a team. We just thought we didn't want to hold them back. And so this year, we're going to follow the same sort of rubric that we did last year, but we did say on the kickoff email that the teams are highly encouraged, and we really hope that people will take that up and do that because Sharon's right, people working together bring diverse ideas, which bring brainstorming and more creativity, and ultimately result in better solutions.

Aurelia Spivey 
Those are some really helpful lessons and when you were speaking about the 103, I did wonder how much overlap there was and the sort of themes that were coming out of that. So it's interesting to hear that there were sort of overlapping ideas. Sharon, I wanted to bring you into the conversation, because as much as we talk about innovation all over social media and all the conferences that, unfortunately, can't be attending right now. The concept of value is something that comes up a lot, we talk about it a lot on this podcast. So, I'd love to hear from you, what value means at Blank Rome.

Sharon Scenna 
At Blank Rome we look at value as partnering with clients, to provide legal services, that really advanced their business needs in a way that goes above and beyond resolving their legal needs. Value is not necessarily about price but about outcomes and good results. We look at value as being business advisors on legal problems and recognizing that any legal problem has an impact on business operations. The way the legal problem is resolved impacts the business and it really contributes to the client's bottom line. We recognize that value means different things to each client. Some clients want a partnership that's really focused on helping them start a business, and really get their business up and running, such as providing strategies on the best venue for corporate registration and ways to really secure financing. Other larger corporations may be interested in value that extends beyond providing them with legal services, such as using tools to enable collaboration and efficiency. An in-house legal team may have the priority of setting and recording budgets, and proven cost savings, such as demonstrating the amount of recoveries received, or perhaps the speed at which litigation is resolved. There may be other ways that we can help demonstrate that the legal department is not just a cost center, but really providing an impact on the company's bottom line. And these are different ways that we provide value to our clients.

Aurelia Spivey 
Thank you and I'm wondering, in terms of getting to understand each client, what it is, that is valuable to them. Do you have a process or some key questions that you ask? What's your approach?

Sharon Scenna 
We really are in the relationship business and our approach is to get feedback from our relationship attorneys about the client's goals. We also do have a formal feedback program, where we work closely with our marketing department, who conducts client surveys, and sometimes clients may be more comfortable sharing some feedback in another way. So we tackle getting feedback in a few different venues.

Aurelia Spivey 
Thank you for sharing that. I think having a few different avenues to hear from clients and sort of collaborate on that internally and feed that out is super helpful. So, I said as we came into this conversation that we would touch on COVID-19 and how that is impacting collaboration with clients in terms of value and in terms of innovation. So, Sharon, do you use, what are you seeing at the moment in terms of the process and the area of value?

Sharon Scenna 
We are seeing a lot of change. So, we certainly are seeing the need to understand clients' short and long-term priorities, and really be able to adjust the approach that we are taking with our clients, on their legal needs. We find it's really more important than ever to collaborate with clients to help reevaluate their strategies, such as first addressing their employment issues and really making sure that they're able to protect and secure their workforce. We also are guiding clients and providing suggestions about regulatory relief or funding that might be available to them. And of course, we're having conversations about priorities on litigation and perhaps a change in the way to pursue an adversarial action. Perhaps, the client has decided to take a different path. We are also seeing an increased focus on cost-saving measures and perhaps that's done by revisiting staffing or looking at a predictable fee arrangement. We are doing a lot more work on budget management and really working with clients to estimate what fees would be on an engagement, and then really help to report back to them on where the matter is going.

Linda Novosel 
The most important question that we ask clients is how they define success. And success, obviously, in the legal sense, in terms of what are they looking to achieve through the engagement, but also from a business perspective? So are they looking for predictability? Are they looking for cost savings? Are they looking for transparency, or efficiency, and many clients are looking for one or all of them or several of them. But it's really important that we understand that and in order to understand that, really probing them, and getting to what their objectives are internally in their organization, can help us to deliver greater value.

Aurelia Spivey 
Thank you. Those are all incredibly practical examples for our listeners to learn from and sort of give some thought to. And Linda, you mentioned, obviously, that you're on your second innovation challenge at this time. So, could you share a little bit about how the crisis is impacting the innovation programs, you've already started and maybe some views on how you think it might impact the entries you get for this session?

Linda Novosel 
I would say that we have not seen an impact on our innovation program. We are continuing to work on the implementation of the winning ideas from 2019. And we're continuing to work on the implementation of solutions that were selected as a result of several different hackathons that we've held over the last year. So we're working remotely, and our innovation team is constantly on calls and video chats, looking to move the ball forward so that we're not held back by this crisis. By us working virtually, in fact, as innovation folks, it would be sort of counterintuitive, if we were held back. I think we're sort of drinking this all in and enjoying it in some ways. You know, it's not a fun time in the world, but there is a silver lining to this, and that is that we're really advancing law firms, tremendously, in just the last eight weeks, we've seen 10 years' worth of change. We are holding a virtual hackathon, our virtual hackathon will be an opportunity for about 16 people to come together and break out into groups to solve the business challenge. We hope that this will be the first of many we know that once we go back to the office, it's not going to reverse back to March 12, where everyone was working in their offices, and we're able to hold conference meetings and come together in one location. So we expect that in the next year or two years that these virtual hackathons will be something that will be really important to our innovation program. So we don't want to stop those hackathons. We don't want to not have opportunities for people to get together and brainstorm. So we're continuing to plan those and implement them, and I'm really excited about Friday's event, I think it will be really interesting.

In terms of the second part of your question, how will this impact our innovation or how we collaborate with our clients going forward? I think there's lots of opportunity here. Lawyers have changed dramatically how they have worked in the past few months. Three months ago, I could never have imagined that the entire firm, no less an entire industry, is working remotely. We now have lawyers who are attending depositions on video, we have lawyers attending court hearings on calls or video as well. It's been very interesting to see how quickly they've shifted and how they have adapted so easily to this new normal. And when I say the new normal, I always think about 2008 when we had an economic crisis. And this is very different this time because not only do we have an economic crisis, but we have a health crisis as well. What we saw after 2008 was that clients wanted more. They started to realize that they could get more from their law firms in terms of value if they made more demands and as a result, we saw people who stepped into roles of legal operations and client organizations. And in response, law firms created roles for pricing and LPM people and now innovation people. I think this crisis has not only allowed us to take advantage of the hunger and the willingness for change internally, but it will also allow us to work more closely with our clients to understand how we can collaborate and come up with solutions that are going to meet their business needs. So I expect that we will see some, constrained clients in terms of expenses. And so we're really going to need to be more cautious about how we perform work, how we define what the work is that they need us to do, and how we streamline the work that we do for them.

Aurelia Spivey 
Can you tell me a little bit about how your teams work together at Blank Rome? So the teams that you both work with and across the firm to deliver on the client's demands for value and innovation that we're talking about. So, Sharon, I'll let you take that one, and then Linda, please feel free to add to that.

Sharon Scenna 
Certainly, thank you. In our roles, we really are in the front and center with legal service delivery. And we find that in some organizations, law firms put innovation in the technology department but that does not necessarily address the efficiencies that can be drawn upon from process improvement and legal talent management. We find on the client value side, we often are hearing about ideas and ways to provide cost efficiencies based upon the demands we're hearing from clients. Our team is literally connected to innovation, client value, and legal project management, all set under the same umbrella. On the client value side, we're able to hear ideas and immediately turn to our innovation team and practice innovation side to really look for ways that we can implement change. And we're really finding that this is impacting the client's bottom line, we're having internal cost efficiencies that we can provide turnkey to clients. So at Blank Rome, I would say as we've talked about earlier, the innovation approach is really cross-functional and draws upon many different areas, including the pricing, LPM, data analytics, technology, business development, and talent management side. And we really try to foster a culture of innovation and really look to execute those projects.

Aurelia Spivey 
You know, any of you, what are the most important skills for business professionals at law firms?

Linda Novosel 
I think there are really two. As we've learned over the last few months, flexibility and ability to pivot and to carry on business operations, and our connections with clients, during this crisis have really emphasized the importance of having those skills. If we had not been as flexible and able to pivot, we would not be able to continue our innovation efforts and continue having conversations with clients about their challenges and how we can help solve those challenges.

The second area where I think business professionals really need to focus their skills is in the alignment of what the business is, as the law firm is, and what our clients need. There are many times when there are nice to-haves in a law firm. It might be nice to have a tool that would help us to do something better, but it's not necessarily a need to have. And it's not necessarily going to add value to our legal service delivery. Of course, there are operations that are critical to the law firm, but it's really important that both of those are aligned. So if we don't align them, then we're just going to be doing things that are going to benefit the firm and our goal is to create the greatest value for our clients and for our clients.

Aurelia Spivey 
Excellent. Sharon, would you like to add to those skills?

Sharon Scenna 
You know, I would add that in addition to the focus on client service, I think it's important for professionals to have a balance between both financial and client service acumen. So they really can take a look and understand the organization's financials, such as revenue, and profitability metrics, and really take that into consideration when trying to satisfy what clients' needs are.

Aurelia Spivey 
I couldn't agree more. I can remember attending an LMA event a number of years ago and that financial acumen bringing that to the group was incredibly important. Now, obviously, we're in a challenging time, but regardless of that, and including that, I suppose, what are the greatest challenges for business professionals at law firms? And how are you overcoming them? And what advice do you have for people to overcome those challenges? I'm going to go back to Linda and then come back to Sharon.

Linda Novosel 
I think the biggest challenge for business professionals in law firms is to understand how we actually deliver our services so that we can constantly, we can help the lawyers improve how we deliver those services. So, the lawyers are so used to doing things in a certain way, it's really helpful to have people who are outside of that sort of bubble, come in and work along with them to understand how we can maybe better deliver services or improve our process, or maybe look at different types of professionals who can support our attorneys in delivering services for our clients. I think that will be our new, or I shouldn't say it will be our newest challenge, because it has always been a challenge. But it is a challenge that we are always faced with. And many law firms don't just have one, two, or three legal services, we have many legal services. So understanding how each of these practices works is very challenging.

Sharon Scenna 
I would add to that, I've worked with some colleagues who have come from outside of the legal industry and I think it's really important for professionals to first listen, and really understand the attorney's perspective and the client's perspective. I think the legal industry is very different than other service industries. And it's really important not to jump to conclusions, but really to try to understand the situation at hand from the client's perspective, as well as the law firm's perspective.

Aurelia Spivey 
Yeah, listening is incredibly important. I'm going to switch now to start talking a little bit more about focusing on the pricing area. One of the pillars I think we mentioned at the beginning, or the underpinning of all the pillars of innovation was data. So this is a question for you, Sharon, I'd love to know how you're leveraging data to increase the precision around pricing. And following on to that, what are your greatest challenges, because we know legal data can be challenging.

Sharon Scenna 
Legal data can be very challenging, and so many ways. You know, first, there's been a recognition in the legal industry that many people think you could use task codes and just pull out task code data and therefore understand the history of a legal matter and therefore predict the future. Well, there are a couple of challenges. First, the past does not necessarily predict the future, every client's situation is different. And we find there such inconsistency and data. Using task codes is not turnkey, and we've had a lot of challenges around the consistency of data. We're really working to try and educate attorneys on the importance of data, such as the way matters are coded, making sure there's a proper fee arrangement in place, and we have found that it's much more effective to use AI tools to really analyze time narratives, rather than depending upon any type of real dependency trust on task codes.

Linda Novosel 
We've worked to adopt a taxonomy, an internal taxonomy, for each practice so that the taxonomy means something at Blank Rome. We're now at a point where we can do a lot of analysis around different time types of matters and different types of clients and different industries. And, as Sharon mentioned, I'm a huge believer in data, however, I don't think that how we handle things in the past is necessarily a harbinger of how we should handle, or how it will be handled in the future, or how we should be handling it. But it is an opportunity for us to dig into that data and understand, are there inefficiencies that we have, that we've been perpetuating through just practices that have been adopted and not changed over time. So that data is a starting point, but we're using it for a lot of different purposes. We're using it to understand how our lawyers are getting experience, how our associates are allocated to different assignments, and ensuring that those associates are getting the sort of experience that we would expect from an associate in a particular practice. We're also using the data to help us to price matters, but also to help us to manage matters. So as we have budgets for many different matters and we want to be able to track those matters and we can do that through the use of task codes input by lawyers, but as Sharon mentioned, that is not necessarily the best way to get accurate data. Anyone who has done this has learned that the accuracy of the data when task codes are inputed by lawyers, or their assistants, or other timekeepers, is probably about 50%. Whereas with the AI, it's probably closer to 80%, and once you tweak the algorithm, it can get closer to 90 or maybe even 95%. So the data is a really important underpinning of our innovation efforts, as it relates to how embedded we are with our clients, and what sort of services we're delivering. Whether we're delivering those services in an efficient way and if not, how we can change that going forward. But also from a talent management perspective.

Sharon Scenna 
The data is so critical to really enforce a pricing arrangement that's in place. And that's one area that I think we've had a lot of success, in terms of helping our attorneys and also our clients have transparency around the agreed fee arrangement, and then being able to report on the status of our budget throughout the matter. So that we can easily give our internal service team and the client, reports on where the pricing arrangement is headed compared to the agreement. So I think that's one area in which we've made a lot of progress on using our data to really manage pricing arrangements.

Aurelia Spivey 
So what I wanted to just add on to that is, can you tell me a little bit about how your teams are using technology to deliver services within the firm and to the client? What is the role of technology in your service delivery? It's probably the most succinct way of saying that.

Linda Novosel 
So as our team is drawn into different matters and understanding how we're delivering services for clients, we're really focused on who's performing the work and how they're performing it. And then a corollary to that is, are there challenges that we're experiencing that are causing us to be inefficient and if so, is there technology that can help us streamline those processes? So we view technology as an enabler and not necessarily the starting point. I've said this in many different forums, I believe that most law firms have technology applications or tools that they have purchased that are sitting on shelves because they never implemented them. And they didn't implement them because it became very tricky, because they hadn't really looked at the people in the process first. So we really take a wide view and a very broad view of how our service delivery is impacted because it's not just by technology. We have technology that we're seeing more and more document automation tools, we're seeing more and more AI tools, and AI is very, very broad, I know, but it is a force that will be something that we'll be dealing with and continuing to deal with in the future. Also research tools. So things have changed dramatically in the last even three years where there's just been a proliferation of tools in the legal industry. And we need to be looking at those tools, but we need to be smart about how we look at them and how we apply them. We also, anyone also who's worked in a law firm will know, one partner, at least, who has been contacted by a vendor trying to sell software and the partner goes, Oh, my gosh, this is awesome, we need this software, and we need to implement it because our clients are going to expect us to implement it. But that's not necessarily how we approach things, we really want to take a step back and look at how are we doing things now and will technology enable us to be more efficient going forward.

Sharon Scenna 
We also are looking at technology tools that really help us collaborate internally and also with clients. So we have, especially with the impact of COVID-19, we have really embraced the use of Microsoft Teams internally, that's been a really important tool for us. And we also are leveraging that as a platform for client dashboards. So our client dashboards are a great way that we are taking the data and exposing it to our clients, in terms of the fee history and different analytics that are around the client matters. So Microsoft Teams has been a really important technology tool for us this year. 

Aurelia Spivey 
We had Steph Corey on the podcast a few weeks ago now, and one of her mottos as well is, use what you've got. And, I think we're seeing a lot more of that too, with the people that we're talking to. Tools that they already had, but haven't actually been implementing and using in the same way. The crisis has brought them to the fore. So we're on the pricing matters podcast. This has been a fabulous conversation if I can get my words out. Thank you so much. But I always like to end with a question. Why does pricing matter to you? So Linda, could you take us away

Linda Novosel 
To me personally, pricing is really important because it is a way to embed ourselves and to embrace our clients, business challenges. So as pricing has become more important to clients since some would say even before the Great Recession, but even more so since the Great Recession, it has been really fun to watch how law firms have responded to it. And pricing allows us to have a relationship that is built on mutual trust. In the old days, it was the law firm to send out a bill and the client had to pay the bill or they would get the bill and it might be much higher than they would have expected, but pricing has really equalized that relationship. It has allowed us to improve our relationships with clients. I also love the financial piece of it. I'm a numbers geek at heart and so it's really fun also to do the analysis around how we can better come up with solutions that work for both the client and the law firm.

Sharon Scenna 
So I agree with Linda, and I really see pricing as a client relationship tool. I think pricing gives us the opportunity to really partner with clients to help address their business needs, whether it be pressing a transaction or litigation or really helping them forecast their legal expenses for an entire year. I think pricing is a great opportunity to partner and collaborate with clients. Of course, pricing is important for both the client and the firm. From the law firm's perspective, we don't want to price something that puts the firm in a position that's really not sustainable. From the client's perspective, price sometimes is not the sole decision maker, but it might be the leading criteria for a client to secure a law firm. So price is really integral in a client relationship. And of course, we always want to price in a way that's really mutually beneficial for both the law firm.

Aurelia Spivey 
Well, thank you so much for joining us on the Pricing Matters Podcast.

Linda Novosel and Sharon Scenna 
Thank you for having us.

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.