Lawyers can be cynical when it comes to innovation. Startups come and go, but the billable hour lives on, and America's biggest law firms routinely report profit margins of 35% or higher.

But things are changing. Between the pandemic, regulatory changes, intense competition for talented lawyers, and client pressure on law firms to cut costs, speed up work, and diversify their ranks, everything is being rethought.

Relationships between law firms and their clients are too often thought of just in terms of buzzwords. Win-win outcomes, or sharing business risk, or investing in the relationship — and these are just a few of the phrases heard when it comes to improving long-term client relationships.

But what does all of this really mean? How do we move past buzz words and identify those factors that truly promote a successful, long-term relationship between a law firm and its client?

In this episode of On Record PR, JD Supra speaks with Keith Maziarek, Director of Pricing and Legal Project Management at Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP and an Officer and Board Member of the Legal Value Network about LVN and the evolution of legal pricing and project management.

The Blickstein Group's latest survey, produced with the Legal Value Network found that 83% of law firm pricing and project management professionals believe they are leveraging technology to deliver legal services more efficiently and in a cost-effective manner, compared to 53% of in-house law department operations workers. The Blickstein Group polled 70 law firm workers and weighed the results against another recent survey it conducted with 108 legal department operations professionals.

While a gap persists between law firm pricing and in-house legal ops professionals, there are substantial opportunities to bridge the divide, say the authors of the new Legal Value Network's Legal Pricing and Practice Management Survey.

There's a significant gap between how law firms and their corporate clients perceive key
issues that can fundamentally impact business relations, finds a survey on legal pricing
and project management.

BigHand published a case study from Am Law 100 firm, Foley & Lardner, which is utilizing both Quantum and Evaluate to drive better matter management and first-class client service. In a quote from LVN member, Jon Lindrus, Manager of Pricing & Analysis, he commented on the study by saying: “Providing outstanding client service and value is a key part of Foley’s proposition. We aim to challenge the traditional law firm standards of opaque pricing, and give our clients transparency over matter budgets. Law firms often talk about offering more transparency and value-based pricing, but rarely have the technology in place to make it a reality.” Check out the study.

In this article, learn best practices on for your law firm's billing practices.

Rob Stote, Director Client Solutions at BigHand recently moderated "a fascinating discussion" on the evolution of the pricing professional and the use of technology for matter pricing and legal project management (LPM). The panel discussion, hosted by the Legal Value Network, brought together a matter pricing and LPM experts from three separate firms to discuss, in broad terms, what the state of legal pricing and project management looked like, the evolution of those roles within a firm, and what part technology plays within the overall process. Here are the takeaways from that discussion.

A predominant narrative in legal industry conversations is that while the rest of the business world evolves at warp speed, law firms steadfastly refuse to change – and unless they begin to innovate, they’re in danger of being overtaken by new delivery models.

Purvi Sanghvi and Michael Byrd share their perspective on pricing, value and billing rates, year-end collects and market demand in this COVID-19 yea-end.

Roy Strom takes a look at why partners rush in to bill time when the economy takes a hit and how the Big Law marketplace seems to run contrary - or is it - to basic business principles.

In this article Bloomberg Law explores how law firms looking to weather the Covid-19 economic storm are throwing some cash-strapped clients a lifeline while trying to avoid steep discounts and pushing to ensure that bills go out on time.

Pricing lessons from the previous global financial crisis little more than a decade ago are still extremely pertinent today for those of us in the legal sector. In this article, Stuart Dodds provides concrete steps to help you more easily navigate those potentially tricky pricing conversations you are — or should be — having with your clients now, while ensuring a more sustainable and profitable future in the longer-term.

We are in a period right now where many clients, perhaps more than even during the Great Recession, are experiencing acute cash flow issues. As a consequence, law firms are feeling a distinct tightening. In this article, Bill Josten spoke with several advisory board members for the Legal Value Network (LVN) "who are some of the most experienced law firm pricing strategists in the industry" about firms offering discounts at a time like this, and whether there may be better options to bolster law firm cash flow

“Our revenue is significantly down. How can you help us through this time?” This is an example of the types of questions facing every outside counsel during this new COVID-19 reality. While the level of loss varies depending on the industry, clients are almost all struggling with revenue decline and looking to outside counsel for help.

This Law360 article about Legal Value Network explores how more clients are looking for ways to reduce the cost of their outside counsel as the world grapples with the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Natwest Business (January 2019). In this expert Q&A with Positive Pricing’s Stuart Dodds. Stuart Dodds, former director of pricing and legal project management at Baker McKenzie, is principal and co-founder of Positive Pricing, a firm that trains and advises professional services on how to create greater value for their clients and achieve better financial outcomes for themselves. Here, he discusses some of the current pricing pressures faced by professional service firms today.

This Legal Executive Institute reports that the founders of the Legal Marketing Association’s P3® Conference recently launched the Legal Value Network (LVN) to connect professionals from law firms, corporate legal departments, alternative legal service providers, and technology providers. The goal, as LVN states, is to bring together those who are “focused on designing, building, and implementing the foundations of a more contemporary and commercially-sound model of legal service delivery.”

As more reports surface that an economic downturn is coming, in-house counsel are going to be paying more attention to how the business is doing. Statistics show that general counsel are worried about some kind of economic downturn in the next year, however, those who work with in-house counsel say day-to-day operations aren’t changing just yet.

This article looks at the current state of legal pricing. It examines what functions pricing people serve and how they can further expand their roles.

Reviewing law firm direct and indirect cost growth trend data trends from the last 10 years or so reveals a relatively stable market equilibrium growth for both cost driver categories. Given the obsessive attention to cost reduction strategies that began as a result of the economic crisis of 2008, it would appear that the reflected levels hovering around the 3% mark can be interpreted to mean that firms have found an effective strategy for capital deployment that enables them to maintain the requisite service quality levels clients expect. However, this number contradicts a common refrain from clients that law firms' expenses grow too much, and should not exceed the US national inflation rate. Here we explore the unanticipated negative implications clients would experience if suppressed expense growth to the often-cited national inflation level of 2%. The true solution to this problem is not cutting costs, but rather collaborating to define priorities, agree on strategy and optimize service delivery.

This is an update on the evolution of OCGs. As OCGs have become more commonplace and have expanded in their coverage, from billing guidelines to broad engagement documents, they are having a bigger impact on the practice and business of law. In addition to digging into the content of OCGs, the article looks at emerging (or lack of) technologies to support how firms manage the intake, review and approval of OCGs by law firms.

Law firm time data exists in various states of disarray, but there is great potential in the analytical value of this information if it can be structured and harnessed to yield meaningful qualitative and quantitative pictures of how each workflow or deliverable was staffed and executed. Once this code is cracked, the utility of the insights gained cannot be exaggerated. This piece explores how time entry data analysis is being approached and enabled by technology vendors in the space. My goal was to illustrate the different approaches--structuring data at the capture phase or processing and making sense of unstructured data post-capture. There are many angles to this topic, but hopefully this provides a practical exploration of at least the fundamental concepts related to the topic.

Clearly, pricing is one of the hot topics in legal practice right now. And with good reason. After all, clients are increasingly demanding fee arrangements instead of hourly billing. With this comes the danger that a poor fee quote could lead to big write offs at a later stage. Play it too safe however, and you aren’t likely to win the bid for the work. So how can legal professionals navigate these complex waters? Well, data and communication according to the experts. Here’s what we learned from all these recent pricing chats.

This article explores how litigation finance/funding has evolved. There is a lot more competition and providers are shifting to fund different opportunities, such as portfolios of litigation and AR. We should expect this competition to increase and for funders to continue to expand their offerings.

Transparency and collaboration are obvious keys to strong and smooth relationships between inside and outside counsel. Less obvious is the role budgets can play in facilitating such relationships. Here, Jared Applegate of Barnes & Thornburg and Justin Ergler of GlaxoSmithKline share best practices on using budgets as a conversational tool to build better relationships.

In this short article, a number of key tips when participating in a law department eAuction are discussed.

The Legal Marketing Association is committed to delivering “the voice of the client” to help members influence and lead change to better serve your clients. As part of that commitment, the LMA Board of Directors invites a client representative to each of our quarterly 2017 Board meetings to share their perspectives. At our March Board meeting, we were joined by Justin Ergler, director of alternative fee intelligence and analytics at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and a member of the Board of Directors of Buying Legal Council.

"Law Practice Magazine", American Bar Association | Approximately 10 years into the legal industry business management renaissance, this article details contemporary themes in strategic pricing of legal services, and outlines the dynamics at play in client/firm fee negotiations and bidding exercises. Both basic and more complex concepts are covered, with the hope that the article will offer something for readers of all levels of sophistication.

The Task-Based Data Analytics initiative — a project that stems from the ACC Legal Operations Metrics & Analytics Interest Group — seeks to find the Holy Grail for companies and law firms who are using VBF arrangements — that is, being able to confidently predict the cost and value of engagements so as to ensure that the agreed fee will be fair to both the company and the firm, without resorting to shadow invoices based on the inefficient hourly-rate billing system.

The relationship between in-house legal and procurement has too often been far from productive. GC finds out how getting everyone on the same page can generate new efficiencies and a more effective method of purchasing legal services.

The involvement of pricing directors in the client conversation has added a positive layer of direct contact when it comes to the client relationship. As clients are boosting up their legal operations functions with business people to guide in-house counsel, they are seeking similar counterparts within law firms. Having a link between business functions helps move along processes (such as billing and rates negotiations) while allowing the legal operations team to talk with someone that “speaks the same language.”