Aurelia Spivey, Marketing Consultant with BigHand, chats with Purvi Sanghvi, Director of Strategic Pricing at Paul Hastings, which has been ranked one of the five most innovative law firms by The Financial Times. She is responsible for creating the platform upon which pricing strategies are implemented across the firm globally. Her team oversees pricing management, develops and analyzes alternative fee arrangements, and creates budgets for complex client matters. She is responsible for pricing strategies for the firm’s top clients, often interacting with them directly as another face of the relationship. In all these responsibilities, she works closely with firm clients and partners to develop innovative, efficient, and results-oriented solutions.
Top three takeaways from this episode
It's not a number discussion. Pricing is a strategic discussion.
Podcast Transcript:
Purvi Sanghvi
Long time ago we were just stuck on an hourly rate model or just discounting our way to try and maintain client relationships. And now that we have business professionals that are the partners of these partners inside the firm, we're able to arm them with so many more tools and knowledge to allow flexibility in their client relationships and help grow them and nurture them in ways that they weren't able to do so before.
Aurelia Spivey
Welcome to Pricing Matters, a podcast by Digitory Legal. Digitory is a data analytics and cost management platform and service, bringing data-driven pricing and cost prediction to law. My name is Aurelia Spivey, and I will be your host as we speak to leaders who are making an impact in legal pricing, discuss market trends, and find out from them why pricing matters.
Welcome to the Pricing Matters Podcast. Our guest this morning is Purvi Sanghvi. She is the Director of Strategic Pricing at Paul Hastings.
Purvi, thanks for joining us.
Purvi Sanghvi
Thanks for having me.
Aurelia Spivey
I always like to start at the beginning. I think it's very helpful for our listeners to hear a little bit about your background and how you found your way into legal pricing. So tell us a little bit more about that.
Purvi Sanghvi
Absolutely, I think it's always interesting to hear everyone's journey because it's such a little niche in the legal world. I was living in Washington, DC and I had just finished my MBA and I was eager to move away from corporate America. I had worked for a consumer products company prior to that and I wanted to use my analytical skills, but in a different sense. One of the recruiters I was working with he came to me and said, hey, have you ever thought about working for a law firm? And I thought, what would I possibly do for a law firm and he kind of educated me on the business side of the firm and the finance and the pricing and all, this was probably 2004, 2005, and I fell into a role that was more of a traditional financial planning and reporting role. Then it morphed into billing rates and pricing and learning all about that.
From there I got hired away by the CEO of Howrey, which no longer exists, but we had a chance to create a department there. That led to answering a lot of the questions that traditional pricing specialists do now, with respect to partnering with our business partners and the firm and our law firm partners, to answer their clients questions. Whether it be putting together a budget, helping answer some kind of a need from a fee arrangement standpoint, helping understand how alternative fee arrangements work, setting and maintaining hourly rates, managing profit. I mean it, it kind of runs the spectrum now, but it all kind of started way back when it didn't really have a name. And when I had gotten hired into Howrey at the time he even told me, I don't even have a job description it's just a lot of white space, but here's what I think we need, what do you think? And it sounded really intriguing and I just kind of fell into it.
Here I am now four firms later and it's just been a really, really cool experience to go into each of these firms, most of the time they haven't had a formal function or a person doing what I do. So I get the chance to put the art on the canvas and figure out how the team should run. What are the best practices? How do we make the partnership a little bit better and a little bit more business minded? So that's sort of been my gig.
Aurelia Spivey
I'd love to talk a little bit more about at P3. I know that you are one of the founders there, and particularly about the women's initiative network. It would be great if you could tell us a little bit about that experience of setting that up and what you've learned from creating that network.
Purvi Sanghvi
Sure, it was about I want to say the fifth conference and we were approaching planning it, and Kristina Lambright and I helped co-found the women's initiative network within the P3 network to enable a chance for women to get together. It wasn't just for women. We don't want to be exclusive in any way, but with all of the importance that's being placed on diversity, inclusion and also the unconscious bias training and everything, there's been so much more that's opened up with regard to understanding that there's a need for networking, there's a need for mentorship. There's the need for getting like minded people together, so that you can really make connections that otherwise might not be made easily. We have all these really smart and amazing people coming to this conference, but we realize a lot of times people might not necessarily have a mentor built in at work or people might not know what a career path could be for them. The goal was to get a lot of people together, especially the women in this world, because we are outnumbered by men. So, get them together and just get a form the started where we can talk about how do we empower each other? How do we help each other? How do we just get more information to each other, more than anything? That's the sort of the need that Kristina and I felt was really necessary, so that is sort of why we wanted to start.
Aurelia Spivey
Tell me a little bit about, were you able to sort of take that from the conference and connect after the event? Has that been something that you've been able to do, building that foundation?
Purvi Sanghvi
It is a work in progress. It’s building because most of us are doing this on a volunteer basis. So, it gets a little hard with timing, but one of the things that we have done is we made connections with mentors. More than anything it's being able to connect people and just you see them as touch points during the conference and then you're able to relate to them and connect with them throughout the course of the year.
But we do have a formal mentoring program that we started, that allows for people to purposefully connect. We try to pair people up with those that have a little bit more experience with those that have a little less. That way we can help create a vehicle by which they can connect with people who may not have been in the field for long and can learn from those that have and those that have can have a way to pay it forward. That is sort of what the intent.
Aurelia Spivey
Justin Ergler, gave a real big shout out to the P3 conference. He called it the CLOC for pricing directors, but he recommended that clients should be attending that conference. From your perspective, hopefully you agree with him, what do you think clients can learn from attending P3?
Purvi Sanghvi
Oh, I absolutely agree with him and I'm really appreciative to Justin for giving us that shout out. What we think is a great take away is the networking and the connections that we can make. There is a lot of sharing of best practices and we are so fortunate with the clients that do come and attend with the candor at which they're able to share experiences. They can really just come down and and very humbly tell us, this is what works for us, and this is what doesn't work for us. How do we get to a point where we can work better together? We try to highlight the best practices that are out there. Unique client law firm relationships that exist, we try to highlight them so other people can learn from them too. And it makes the client voice very accessible in our setting as well.
We're a smaller group than CLOC, and so for us it's easy to kind of get people to navigate around and make those connections. The key reason was really just to hear their voice and hear their perspectives, and that helps us bridge the gaps from our end when we're trying to be a better service provider. We really enjoy having them at our conference, so we can learn. And if there are others out there that want to come, I think that's the main takeaway, we'd be able to collaborate a little bit more about how do we make things better. How can I help you make that RFP process better? Just starting from there. How can I help you with a problem that you might have with law firms that we as pricing may not even understand. Maybe it's a billing related issue, but I can help you to be a conduit to you, to help you figure out how to solve that problem. We hope to have more of those aha moments with people attending in the future.
Aurelia Spivey
So I'd love to know if you have any sort of examples of where you and your team have engaged with the clients in the process.
Purvi Sanghvi
Sure, what I've noticed is the evolution of my role is that I'm a lot more client facing now then I was when I first started. It's become a really neat aspect of the law firm client relationship in that we have another point of contact. So, a lot of our big clients will have a big legal OPS department and it's almost become second nature for the partners now within my firm to say, OK, well, you have legal OPS and I have Purvi and we're going to connect you two. You guys will meet on your own and figure things out on the business side, and I will meet with the in-house team on my side, and I'll figure out things on the legal side. It helps to create more connections and strengthen the relationship that we have with the client overall.
What that has led to is, in one example, I have weekly client meetings with the person from legal OPS. Where I am on the phone with them just talking about business side issues and helping to connect the dots on things that we just haven't hadn't gotten done or things that were coming down the pike. So, we're able to be better at budgeting and forecasting accrued and cleaning up issues that might exist on the business side of the relationship.
Another example is that I'm invited to quarterly business review meetings for some of our other clients. Where it's very natural for me to be part of it. Be another voice in the room, to hear what they're saying, so that I can understand and get the feedback straight hand. What are we doing well? What could we be doing better? And it helps me selfishly because I understand more about the relationship. I love learning more about the strategy behind why they are a client of ours and what we can do, and that goes more into the business development side of this role. Then I really enjoy being able to help support questions that they might have from a financial angle because it helps alleviate the pressure on the partners to have to have the answers for everything. It really shows them that we've got dedicated resources at our firm to help manage this relationship. It's not just a one person managing it all kind of thing. So, it's been a really nice sort of evolution in where our roles have gone.
Aurelia Spivey
I love hearing that and it makes so much sense from a business perspective to have that collaboration in the room.
So, I want to switch back again to one last question about P3. I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the 2018 panel, which was, whose fault is it? Tell us what your key takeaways were because that was a big twittersphere explosions, so I'd love to hear from you. What do you recall from that?
Purvi Sanghvi
Well, you know, one of the things that we always say is, if you're going come to one of our conferences it's not going to be just talking head panels. We don’t want people's eyes rolling in the back of their heads because they’ve falling asleep with the content we're trying to deliver. We really want to make it interactive and dynamic and people to feel like, well, you know what, I invested time and money to be here, and it was really worth it. And yes, I might be behind on my emails at work, but I've got this and that to take away and make my own team better because of my time here.
One of the things that we wanted to do for that particular conference was to end it on a high note. We had this debate style session set up where we just wanted to kind of take the gloves off and speak to each other very frankly about what the issues are and just highlight them. Putting it out there as to what people complain about on the law firm side, what people complain about on the firm side and and how do we try to change that? What's frustrating to both sides? It was really neat to hear because I don't think anyone took it personally, I think it was a very productive discussion because it brought light to some of the things that we're all challenged with on a day-to-day basis.
Being able to hear it from both sides, from the client side and from the firm side, it was nice because now you're kind of going into a conversation the next time you view your client to say, look, I understand this might be a pain point of view, let me tell you about my perspective or vice versa. It ends up with a more collaborative discussion. So that was the intent of that, and I think it came off in a very fun way, personally.
Aurelia Spivey
Fantastic, I’m going to move now to some of the challenges that pricing teams can face. We've talked about pain points a bit, so one of the challenges can be lawyer engagement. I'd love to hear from you, you've been a number of firms now, how do you get lawyers engaged with pricing from the outset on as many matters as you possibly can?
Purvi Sanghvi
Well, I think it was fortunate for me when I first started since the firm didn't have a pricing director, prior to my coming here. When I was introduced to the firm the mandate, so be it, was that if you have anything that is a nonstandard arrangement, please talk to Purvi before you proceed, because she can help you understand the risk benefit profile of what you want to do. Or if you don't know what you want to do, she can help you figure it out. And it was a very simple sort of ask of the partnership and then it was just up to me to kind of win them over, to help them understand that I really can add value.
I'm not here to be a rubber stamp to just say, OK, 10% discount move along, next. It's more of a dynamic discussion to say, well, what are you trying to achieve? What has a client said? What do you need to do? What's the competitive landscape? Why are we trying to win this work? What will it mean to you? How much negotiation is involved? You know, the whole evolution of a conversation. But having those kinds of in-depth conversations with each and every partner is a large portion of my role and that's just time invested, because now they'll naturally be inclined to come to me next time just to vet things before they move on.
I always tell them, it's not a number discussion. Pricing is a strategic discussion. I'm not here to just bang up on you on metrics. I use data and metrics to help prove certain points about where we want to go, but that's not the only deciding factor when we make a decision, and we make a decision together. That has become a real sort of key success factor for my role here in terms of attorney engagement, because now I don't feel like I have to force people to come talk to me, they will naturally want to talk to me.
Aurelia Spivey
That's some good advice, and if you're in a firm or you think you don't have that support. It's great to go in and you've got that high level of support. Any sort of tactic for people who want to get to the position that you're in, where people are coming to them more often than not. Any sort of practical things you'd you'd advise?
Purvi Sanghvi
Well, I mean, if you're able to get your hands on data and do some analysis and if you have one or two considerations for the relationship partner, on how you might be able to make the financial health of the relationship better. Pick up a phone, call them and see if that's something they're willing to consider. With other ones, if it's a relationship that you have because it was a result of winning an RFP and you're on their panel now, see if there's a legal operations person you can connect with. Then make that sort of a hook and a way to get to trying to be more involved at the client level. Work very closely with the business development team, so that when there's pitches happening, you're also part of the conversation. I mean, we don't move forward without each other at our firm. So, it's a neat alignment to have and to try and make sure you are part of those conversations too.
Aurelia Spivey
I love that, it's a lot of productivity and collaboration, is what I'm hearing in those insights.
So, you talked about data and obviously we talked about data at Digitory as well. So, I would love to hear from you, how are you leveraging data to increase precision around pricing? What challenges you might have with data in law firms?
Purvi Sanghvi
Well, challenges, there's a lot of it. There is a lot of data out there. I think that you have to put a reality filter on whatever information you're pulling together. I counsel my team with the same advice day in and day out. There is a lot of information out there. You can pull all kinds of metrics and reports together, but you have to put it into the perspective. You have to put yourself in the perspective of the person you're giving that data to.
So, if you're giving it to an attorney and they're facing needing to give you a decision, have you given them the information in a format that they can digest it quickly? Have you given them the information in a format in which they can then make a decision for you? Or ask a question back to you? If the answer is no, then you need to simplify. You need to simplify. You need to tell them the story of what your numbers are telling you. You need to make it easy for them, because it's our job to understand the numbers and it's their job to take our analysis and then react and do something with it. Once you do that over and over again, you'll find yourself making recommendations and suggestions as to what the ultimate decision should be.
I have partners here who rely on me for that very reason. You know, what do you think I should do? What would you do? And it is a really great place to be because I know that at that point, it's not about the fancy tools and the technology that we've employed in order to get to that place. It's understanding the intersection between data analysis and the relationship with the client and the partner, and just pulling all that together in order to help move the business process forward.
Aurelia Spivey
So another challenge that we may come up against is vague RFP's. How do you deal with those? Do you have any advice for people who are still coming up against them and what they could do to make the most of that situation?
Purvi Sanghvi
Ask questions, that would be my main point of advice. Oftentimes you get a vague RFP because it could be coming from a client that is not as sophisticated and procuring these kinds of processes. So, it's up to us to partner with them and help them figure out what it is they're asking for. A lot of times they don't know what they don't know. They don't know what they're asking for and they will throw some things out there, but they might not yield the result that they want.
Oftentimes what happens is if you don't ask and you answer one way and the firm next to you answers another way. The client receives a bunch of answers that are just apples and oranges at the end of the day. Then they have to figure out how to whittle that down and yield months of time lost. No relationship is there, and they have to come back and redo it. It is just unfortunate overall. So, if you're seeing something like that come across your desk where it's kind of vague, usually what I will do is, I'll get in touch with the relationship partner and talk about, well, what is our relationship like with this client? Are we able to call them and ask for more information? Usually there's no harm in doing so, and we're able to glean a little bit more about what the pain point is that the client is trying to solve. So, that would be my first suggestion.
Then if you're not able to get more information from the client during that juncture, I would say come forth with the response that you can stand by and leave it open because you know that they're going to come back and ask more questions. So that would be, that would be my second point of advice.
Aurelia Spivey
So I'd love to hear from your experience, are there other practice areas or types of work that are most suited to alternative fees? Generally, how are you dealing with them because we hear so much about them.
Purvi Sanghvi
It is interesting because it remains that you're looking at things on a case-by-case basis, because each engagement can have its own nuances. So, it's hard to say that all the time one thing will apply within one practice area or all the time one thing won't work. That's just not the case and everything does need to be looked at on an individual basis. That being said, the trends that I've seen are sort of where all of this started. Litigation continues to be hammered with requests for alternative fees anytime an engagement comes through, or an RFP is issued. They're really looking at that and it's just the nature of the work and the way it happens and the chronology in which it happens. It lends itself to being open to fixed fees or phased fixed fees or even success fee arrangements.
There are other areas that, employment law in particular, where some parts of it are a little bit more price sensitive than others. So, you'll see more requests for alternatives coming out of that area. I've seen a little bit more in our investigations in white collar area. Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head that seem to be able to be malleable for working in these alternative fee arrangements. That being said, I'm sure I've done them for corporate or real estate, for other areas. It's just those were the three most prevalent that sort of stuck out in my head.
Aurelia Spivey
Do you have any sort of criteria from your experience, that you think make a better alternative fee? How do you make that work for both parties?
Purvi Sanghvi
Scoping and transparency discussion. Being upfront about what it is that you're trying to price right now and what's the value that you're trying to derive out of it. What are the goals? If you can have those upfront discussions and get those expectations laid out then, as you're managing to the alternative fee arrangement during the course of the engagement, when things change, when scope changes, when more work comes out about it, the secondary conversation is then easier to be had. Because you've already leveled that set the expectations in the beginning. It is a collaborative discussion that's a little bit more time invested upfront, but it will yield a lot more dividends down the line, if you're able to structure it that way.
Aurelia Spivey
Yeah, absolutely, and that's what we're hearing across the board. It's just taking that time and and making sure that it is done from the start.
So, now I'm going to switch gears a little. I want to talk about pricing teams and the pricing skill set required to be in this role. One of the things that is is pretty apparent pricing teams are still pretty small in comparison to perhaps some of the other teams in the firm. Some of the average sizes are around two to three people. So, from your experience, how do you prioritize with that number of people? What should people be focusing on in a small team like that?
Purvi Sanghvi
Well, it gets hard because you often find yourself reacting to whatever is sort of in front of you at the moment or the the fire drill that happens that day. And that is the nature of the role regardless of how big or small the team is. So, I think what we have to do is, we have to keep an eye on the big picture and keep an eye on the proactive project and the long-term things that we have to do and keep an eye on the short term and the short turnaround requests that come through. It's not easy to walk that tightrope, it's a constant challenge, but I think if you work with that mindset at the forefront, then it will help you prioritize what needs attention right now versus what can wait.
We are also in a service culture, so everyone always wants to say yes. Everyone always wants to say yes and everyone is kind of deadline driven and works at the last minute pace. And you have to sometimes push back, and I think that's OK. You're never saying no. Like, look, I'm happy to help you, but I need to understand what's the request is. I need you to understand that I've got this and this and this on my plate and then we'll work out how to get you what you need. Usually that makes it a more human conversation.
Aurelia Spivey
How do you train or coach more junior members of your team with that pushback, because that that can be hard.
Purvi Sanghvi
Yes, it can be hard, and oftentimes it's my job to do the pushback not theirs. I think it is understanding, it is coaching them. A lot of the time if I'm seeing interactions happen on an e-mail, where I'm copied into the conversation, it's kind of picking up the phone right when it's happening and coaching them through. Well, this is how I would have done this. This is how this is how you should think about this. It's also keeping them in the loop on the bigger picture. I make it a very stringent point that I have a weekly team meeting with my team. We're scattered all over, so we try to do it via web conference, and we talk about things that are happening at a firm level and then we talk about what's happening on each of our individual plates. And while there are people in the room that don't have anything to do with task a or task b, it's still very helpful for them to hear what's going on, because you never know if they might get asked a side question about that very same task. And they're able to draw some connections and create some loops based on that. Having that helps them understand what's going on in the bigger picture rather than just what's happening at my desk, at my computer. That helps with prioritizing tasks, that helps with understanding who needs what and why.
So that is really important to me and I guess the take away from that is just communication. Communication is so necessary; it is so valid. And people are always learning. People are always evolving and just understanding to make sure that that communication loop is there is the key to success with small, lean teams. Then just putting a bit of perspective on it and understanding, yes, there's ten people that need things today, let's figure out together how we tackle that. Making sure that we're constantly having that conversation. So that helps in training them and coaching them, so that three weeks down the line when they're faced with that same kind of day again, maybe they already have an idea of how to tackle it.
Aurelia Spivey
Communication being a very important skill. I want to segue into what do you think are the most important skills for people in the pricing profession?
Purvi Sanghvi
Analytics obviously are very important skill. Taking the time to learn, I would say, mid to advanced level Microsoft Excel is always going to win points in this profession. Data visualization is becoming a really big thing as well. So, if you're able to translate the data from Excel into something that's more visual, that's become really key within what we're doing nowadays. Communication, which I just mentioned, is a huge thing. For me it is all forms of communication, it's the written, it’s the oral, verbal, the face-to-face interpretation. Just understanding when you have to use what.
Oftentimes my team will tell you, I'll see emails happening and I'll reply back to one of them and say, did you pick up the phone and call this person or has it only been on e-mail? And they know me well enough now to always have an answer to say, yes, I tried and this is what happened or what have you. So, I think that's really important, especially at the onset when you're a junior member of the team, or you’re a team that's just starting out, or you're starting to work with someone that you haven't worked with as much before. That connection that you can make, when you have a phone conversation. So, that the intention of what you're trying to do comes across more clearly. That makes the e-mail conversations that could happen afterwards so much more productive, so much more constructive. So much faster.
So, I really underscored the importance of face-to-face or just the phone call. We have video phones in our offices and so oftentimes my phone calls are face-to-face conversation. So, I interchange the two a lot, but I really enjoy that aspect of it because you make a connection and it's just an easier conversation to have.
Aurelia Spivey
Absolutely, and it ultimately boils down to the relationship. To be able to advise someone, you have to have a good relationship.
We've talked a little bit about some of the challenges that pricing professionals face. Are there any others that you can think of and how you've overcome them or your teams overcoming some of the challenges that you experienced in?
Purvi Sanghvi
The challenges you know, there is a lot of being a lean team, as most of us are within our firm, and when you're housed in a very large firm. I think one of the challenges is understanding what your blind spots might be. There are a lot of people that come to me for advice and for consultation on how to approach pricing with their clients, but there's probably a few that don't and are they going out the door with some kind of proposal that I haven't been involved in? And what kind of risk does that put the firm at? It's hard to know, like I said before, you don't know what you don't know. So, understanding how we just constantly educate our partners to make sure that's not happening is always key. It is a minority percentage of the time, I don't think it's happening a lot, but it's something that is a challenge because you want to make sure you're at least touching everything that goes out the door in some way shape or form. So that is a challenge.
It would be nicer to have a larger team, I think at times, and just understanding how to kind of lobby for that and get support for that, that's something that weighs on me at times. There's a lot of minutiae, there's a lot of little steps that need to happen in order to manage and maintain all of our fee arrangements on the technology side. I don't a lot of the time, the attorneys appreciate what that means, and it's not for not wanting to understand it. I think it's just because they haven't been exposed to it and they don't know. Every partner is looking at their book of business and their client portfolio and they make decisions based on what impacts them, as they should. But I don't think it's very apparent sometimes where if you multiply that times 200 then what kind of complexity is everyone creating on the system, on the business processes? Have we created something we can't maintain? Are we doing things as efficiently as we could? The efficiency piece is something that plagues me a lot recently, but I think as an industry of law firms across the globe, we all struggle with this because there are lots of business processing that can be strengthened. Now is the time to start looking at those. So, I would say those are kind of the things that I look to as challenges and interesting hurdles to conquer over the next few years.
Aurelia Spivey
This has been a really interesting conversation and I think our listeners are going to learn and really appreciate hearing from you. As the podcast is called Pricing Matters, I do like to end with this question. Purvi, why does pricing matter to you?
Purvi Sanghvi
Pricing matters to me because it's a very important field within the business side of law that can really help progress the industry and the way we provide legal services, because you're able to think about things differently. A long time ago, we were just stuck on an hourly rate model or just discounting our way to try and maintain client relationships and now that we have business professionals that are the partners of these partners inside the firm. We're able to arm them with so many more tools and knowledge to allow flexibility in their client relationships and help grow them and nurture them in ways that they weren't able to do so before. So, it's a really value-added area of law firms, that I really enjoy being a part of. And I love the educational aspect of it. Being able to teach my team but also being able to teach the partners and that has become a really great portion of this role, so I enjoy all of that.
Aurelia Spivey
Thank you for listening to Pricing Matters, a podcast Digitory Legal. To find out more about our guests please visit our podcast page. If you have any feedback or guests that you think we should feature, please reach out to me. Thank you for listening, see you next time.
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