Archives for Practice Management category
This past week my company, Manzama, had the pleasure of hosting a Chief Marketing Officer Dinner in New York City. The group was an intimate one, approximately 15-18 CMOs from some of the largest law firms in New York. And, while I am not at liberty to discuss specific firms or comments, I would like to share some of the big ideas I heard at the table as various questions were posed to the group as a whole:
(a) Profitability – The expectation is that it’s not just the accounting team’s responsibility to understand matter and client profitability metrics. The responsibility is a collective one, especially in light of the fact that marketing/business development are the first line of defense when it comes to interfacing with client teams and concerns;
(b) Business Intelligence – some firms have re-organized to fold library and other traditionally IT functions into the marketing departments – do we see a trend here as more of these folks are asked to perform business intelligence functions that need to closely align with the firm’s marketing strategies;
(c ) Contract lawyers – growing percentage of firms are using contract lawyers in a number of different contexts.
It’s a rare event to get a group like this together to share thoughts over dinner. In the event this blog entry finds them, I wanted to personally thank each and everyone for their time and interest.
Best,
Peter
This past week I gathered with a group of colleagues in San Francisco, represented were a number of CKOs from some of the largest law firms on the west coast. The group has been meeting and expanding for years. The fundamental drivers for the group are to discuss a range of issues and challenges that large law firms are facing. Overall, here’s what I say were the main takeaways from our get together:
(a) Automation — although a lot of discourse tends to focus on AFA (alternative fee arrangements), to actually deliver on flat fee or fixed arrangements, firms need “automation,” that is to say they need to take the low hanging fruit and process and find ways to deliver to the client at lower price points. I can’t think of a firm in the group that had not begun some sort of an effort here. Related to this theme — the growing % of AFA arrangements, the group differed from 15 – 35% of work falling in this bucket. Initial reaction was that even 25% seemed high, but the reality is if we write-off good percentages of non-fixed fee arrangement, are we not in effect doing the same thing?
(b) Sharepoint as CRM — I was surprised to hear this, but it makes sense. The frustrations with the incumbents continues to fuel the need to consider other options;
(c) Next Big Thing — the group watched Mary Meeker’s presentation from Web 2.0 Oriely Conference, a must see. It generated a fair amount of conversation as to where the market is trending. As expected, opinions differed as to how these global trends would impact law firms from “not at all” to “wow” moments. My personal “Ah-ha” was related to the growth of mobile — as a business leader, I already feel like I am behind, but fortunately some of my colleagues did not share this perspective and suggested law firms (namely lawyers) are just not that interested in accessing applications via their mobile devices. This said, if I were still CKO at Paul Hastings, I think I’d be scrapping my plans for version 5.5 of the portal and thinking about how I can reach the lawyers with the right services/information via mobile apps, etc.
Best,
Peter
This past week was a great week for our company. Note, typically I’d like to refrain from using this forum to promote or business (at least directly:)). This being said, Friday, October 15th, Manzama was selected as the winner of the Bend Venture Conference, and with it the prize of $200,000 to be invested in our current Series A round. The good news is we had already achieved our financing goal for our Series A, and the $200,000 put us in an oversubscribed scenario.
However, I think the most important take away (at least for me professionally and personally) was the validation that came with being selected the winner among some very other strong business plans from all over the Northwest. The format was a ten minute presentation followed with a 10 minute Q & A. On a practical level, this means that we’ll be in a better position to deliver new features, request and services to our client base. Here’s a link to the original tweet:
http://twitter.com/bendventure
I have the pleasure of participating in a CKO/CIO Roundtable dating back to my days at Paul Hastings (where I held the position of CTO/CKO). The group meets every few months and consists mostly of AMLAW 150 firms. Top on the group’s mind as of late have been: (a) KM lite — doing more with less; (b) AFAs — creating workflow systems to help manage and (c) Normalizing Data. It’s the last topic I want to spend a few moments on today — in that it’s so very critical to being able to effectively offer a client an alternative fee or fixed fee arrangement. I am not convinced firms have nailed normalizing their data to be able to justify and clearly defend to management profit margins in fixed fee or alternative fee arrangements, other than for the simplest of matters. If others out there have had success — would welcome your input.
Much is, and has been, said about the outsourcing of legal work product, law firm infrastructure, etc. In a former post, I commented on Seyfarth Shaw’s Lean Six Sigma, which is really (in some respects) a good response to outsourcing — become more efficient and effective, change practices long-term. Another method I learned of, after sitting down with a CKO at an AMLAW 20 firm was “insourcing,” higher lawyers that perform the more standardized legal work (1st yr – 3rd year associate type of work) in more affordable markets, secondary employment markets, thus, work gets done at more appropriate rates. To me, this was another indication of how much more savvy law firms are becoming with respect to the ever changing climate. Here’s a quote from the law21.ca blog that I thought did a nice job of summing up the point:
“If I were an LPO (Legal Process Outsourcing), I’d be nervous every time I read about a law firm that provided secondments, gave legal project management training, managed its workflow, unbundled its services, used decision trees, or even employed Lean Six Sigma, because it means they’re starting to adopt some of my stock in trade. The critical battleground in the legal services marketplace is not price, but innovation: inventing and implementing more efficient and effective ways to carry out legal work. That’s a tougher and far more important assignment than simply lowering the cost of associate work, and whoever figures it out first and best could, like Toyota and Sony, dominate this market. LPOs are in a strong position to compete in this race, but they’re not the only contestants.” The full-text of this entry can be found at:
http://www.law21.ca/2010/06/08/the-evolution-of-outsourcing/
Project/Case/Transaction Management just started to emerge when I was at my law firm in 2002, the processes were typically reserved for the largest of clients and quite rudimentary. Seyfarth’s work is just the beginning — it’s hard to see the pressure on fixed fees, alternative fee arrangements going away anytime soon. Recently, I had a chance to sit down with a managing partner (of one of its offices), he was very bullish on what the firm has accomplished to date. As our discussion turned to the future, he felt the firm was in a stronger position than just a few years ago to leverage not only processes, but technology and people as well — in part due to efforts related to Six Sigma effort. Here’s another blog post that adds additional color to the implementation, worth the read.
