1. Pricing, Budgeting and Monitoring Today
paul.oconnor@Prosperoware.com
Director of Operations EMEA
2. Who is Prosperoware?
• Founded 2009
• Very deep expertise in legal process
• Deep understanding of Worksite and DMS
• Offices: Philadelphia, Chicago & London
• Over 100 clients
7. • Need to forecast and
budget for legal
spend
• Expectation that
services will be
delivered efficiently
• View a greater range
of firms able to
deliver results
General Counsel Demands
Predictability
8. Jackson Reforms
• Requirement to provide
budgets to court
• Requirement to monitor
these budget
• Need to put them in the
court’s form
9. Start with a price and then determine
the resources and hours
Top
Down
Bottom
Up
True project management where
the matter is planned in detail
Two Ways to Build a Budget
18. Expose Matter Metadata
• Re-approach the problem
• Expose the data to them
• Intranet
• Ask them about it through life of
the matter
• (e.g. email)
Screenshot from Prosperoware’s Product: Umbria
19. • Need to develop a firm phase and
task code system
• Map client code to firm
• Data can be easily leveraged
Phase and Task Codes
Good afternoon everyone. Today I’m going to spend 15 minutes discussing Pricing. This talk could easily have an alternative title “Why we should have categorized our matters – what’s Plan B”
I have just two slides to provide a little background on ourselves. Our marketing, development and professional services staff have been in legal for many years. Keith Lipman my CEO, Sheetal Jain our CTO, and indeed myself have all spent many years working with legal document management from Wang to Softsolution to PCDocs and many years at iManage, Interwoven before Prosperoware. We understand Legal marketplace and our solutions reflect that.
In 5 years, over 100 firms have made the decision to invest in our solutions. Impressive results in a market that From our smallest 50 user firm to our largest UK and worldwide client KPMG, with over 14,000 users. USA have a head start on us, but this side of the pond we are working with:Bird & Bird, BLP, Dentons, DLA, Hill Dickinson, KPMG and Sackers.Speak to these guys, check out if we’ve managed to help them with some of the challenges facing your firm.
We have four platforms:Milan for GovernanceZone for Mobility and Remote AccessAscera for SharePoint publishingAnd the focus of today Umbria for Pricing
I’m going to spend the next 10 minutes covering these five points. What’s changed why is Legal Project Management all the rage ?How do we build a budget nowHow should we be leveraging all the good work already done, and avoiding making the same mistakesWhat need s fixing and how might we fix it
The legal market isn’t growing. To keep profits growing, you need to win more business in a declining market or lower your costs.“But without changing how lawyers approach a legal matter at the outset, any new processes or technology will not be sufficient to support a major cultural shift such as that required by LPM.” http://www.americanbar.org/content/newsletter/publications/law_practice_today_home/lpt-archives/february13/the-role-of-technology-in-supporting-legal-project-management.html
Client demands and expectations are changing on a scale never witnessed before. Report after report emphasizes the fact that:Your firm will lose the work if the quality of your lawyers isn’t up to scratch – that’s a no-brainer – forgive the pun.But increasingly your firm won’t win the work without offering perceived value, and by that we mean efficiency, predictability, and cost effectiveness in the delivery of legal services……..“Over the past five years, clients have talked increasingly about enhancing the "value" they receive for the legal services they purchase, and it has become increasingly clear that what they mean by "value" is efficiency, predictability, and cost effectiveness in the delivery of legal services, quality being assumed.” (https://peermonitor.thomsonreuters.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2014_PM_GT_Report5.pdf )
To top it off though if you reckon that the beautiful relationship you have with your clients will mean they don’t need to worry about providing budgets. That is unless you do Civil Litigation . Not only do you have to budget and present them to the court in an agreed format, you need to be prepared to justify that budget and show its proportionate and also consider alternative feesLets face it, most of our firms need to budget
There are variations on this, and tools to assist, but these are Top Down – Reckon it’ll be around £80K, that’s about £40K on discovery, £20 on case prep, and £20 on the case.Bottom Up, parameters are plugged into a template, key questions answered and a wizard (Often called an Excel spreadsheet ) churns out a nice ghantt like chart that might even come close to the top down approach.
Partners use their knowledge and experience to produce a budget, but the demands from clients, competitors and regulators will require bottom up budgets so they need to get there.to budget.Lord Jackson just over a year ago stated “‘Costs budgeting is a skill which all lawyers could acquire…‘if they are prepared to give up time to being trained …[and]..effective costs management is well within the abilities of all judges…. [and it].. has the potential to control …costs.
We need to leverage the experienceWe have done this before We know the risks, uncertainties and have taken them into account.
Lets provide transparency on our existing work, For my firm, or my practice area, for this type of work , lets see the spread of fees, time, profitabilityHow accurate were these budgets?
lets drill down into similar matters, see the budget, see the cost, see the profitability.What tasks and activities were undertaken and by whom
So what’s the challenge
When I first started selling the virtues of DMS 25 years ago, I had faith , a true belief that our clients would with a couple of clicks be able to “Show me similar matters or documents” . Our technology of the time enabled this to happen. My demos were great.Years later I still go firms which have the largest number of documents classified under temp temp or 9999Users don’t bother classifying docs against matters, never mind applying meaningful meta-data to matters.
Having trouble classifying matters, then phase and task codes have been worse.Primary purpose of the phase and task codes to date have been to justify the 6 minute time bite to get the bills paid.Pity the person who is given the task to rationalise historical time and billing entries.
We can classify and expose meaningful met-data in different waysWe could try AI through auto-classification. Generally expensive , Professor Katz at Michigan State University did a great job examining the sophisticated forms of tools designed to guide a lawyer’s legal reasoning: Such as (1) People who cite Case X also cite Case Y; and (2) Lawyers who argue Principle X also typically argue Principle Y; and increasing complexity finds it hard to fully express and predict in a model alone. However, like many of the breakthroughs in commercialized artificial intelligence and in our feedback economy, it was not the model, but rather the click data, or the feedback effect, that ultimately led to a transformative product.Re approach the problem – expose data to them and solicit feedback. ( Face book, Linked in, Crowd sourcing work)
When their only purpose was for billing – our current methods were good enough.Now we want them for Pricing – Where can we become more efiicient on these phase and tasks, who is the best resource for this taskBudgeting – Lets aim to make a profit and win the business, and monitor our progress.
