“Congratulations, your company stocks just went up 10%, you should treat yourself with a nice weekend get-away,” you hear your virtual assistant saying via the sound-system. Smiling, you get dressed and head over to the virtual meeting area in your home office to join your colleagues Ivan, Paramjit, Rafiq, and Wei-Ting. Funny, you work with them all the time but have only met Paramjit in person at an industry event a few months ago. You’re still getting used to seeing them as holograms rather than on the work surface that is as large as your desk.

Wei-Ting, your newest team member is beaming: “I just ran the analysis: According to our pitch probability prediction model, we should have a 78% chance of winning the pitch that came in last night.” “What’s their lifetime customer value to us?” you ask. Ivan vigorously types on his screen. It takes less than 2 seconds before the number -$750m- pops up on your screen.

“And they always pay fast,” adds Rafiq. “Well, you know what to do, I’d run process 901 and assemble the team,” you say, smiling at her. “Let’s make it 100%!”

Read the current issue of Strategies, the Journal of Legal Marketing, for further glimpses into the future by the industry’s leading minds: 2020 Vision.

Are legal budgets adaptable estimates or fixed targets? This question often receives opposing answers from corporations and law firms. Traditionally, law firms liken budgets as relatively flexible approximations that can be adjusted, without notice to the corporation, should the projected circumstances change. On the corporation side, CEOs and CFOs increasingly expect their GC to set any legal budgets well in advance and manage it like any other department’s annual budget.

Long gone are the days when no one was questioning the legal department’s spend. Certainty of budgeting and forecasting are no longer buzzwords in legal departments around the country, but today’s precondition. Success can only be achieved if both sides of the table speak the same language and share a common goal.

In fact, legal departments are increasingly expected to budget and manage within allocated funds; not only for a specific matter but from an annual planning budget perspective. To ensure that budgets are taken seriously by corporate law departments, it has become increasingly common for organizations to tie general counsel’s (GC) pay to how well the department meets its annual budgetary targets.

In turn, legal departments demand a more careful examination and management of budgets from their law firms. Some law firms see this as an opportunity to strengthen the relationship with their clients. The key to success is for each side to gain as much information related to their historic experience on similar cases, as well as leverage industry data. Sharing this data through a win-win approach will allow for a more predictable and accurate budget that will deliver the greatest value to both sides.

TyMetrix Legal Analytics hosted a peer-to-peer networking event, the LegalVIEW® Forum, on improving the certainty of budgeting & forecasting at the Cosmos Club in Washington DC on May 16th. The next LegalVIEW® Forum will be held July 11 in Chicago on Sourcing Legal Providers in a Changing Business Environment. Sign up here for free.

Using a model like the “Four Pillars For Providing Value” can help the parties reach a negotiated fee solution allying these suspicions and achieves many of their goals:

• SCOPE: Define the boundaries of the project and the results it will produce
• BASELINE: Determine the known state of past performance so it can be measured and compared
• BENCHMARK: Gain intelligence into how others provide the same services and values
• VALUE: Ensure offering aligns the goals of both the client and firm

The key to success is for each side to gain as much information as possible about market pricing. Such information is now readily available.

Opening TED-Style Discussion: Emerging Trends in Buying Legal Services—Law firms and corporate law departments will collaboratively examine key elements and challenges that arise when budgeting and forecasting the business of law. The group will discuss what current tools that exist to improve planning and the factors that must be considered, such as average matter durations, total costa, rates, and staffing allocations for matters by timekeeper role, phase, task, and geography.

Workshop Collaboration: Improving the Certainty of Budgeting and Forecasting—Hear and discuss new ways corporate law departments and law firms can improve the certainty of budgeting and forecasting in case study exercise with peers. Groups will examine a real-life legal challenge and develop a proposal that is acceptable to both the firm and the corporation.

Workshop Results & Discussion: Scope, Baseline, Benchmark, Value—Upon conclusion of the group exercise, there will be a collective presentation of the workshop findings mapped to four defined pillars—Scope, Baseline, Benchmark, Value—that provide a blueprint for better budgeting and forecasting for both law firms and corporations.

Register now

Finding solutions for this challenge was the basis for a case study at the recent LegalVIEW Forum in New York. Private practice lawyers and law firm managers on the law firm side and in-house lawyers, legal procurement and legal operations professionals on the client side, worked on their approaches side-by-side. To register for the next LegalVIEW Forum (May 16 in DC) on the topic of “Improving the Certainty of Budgeting and Forecasting,” please  click here.

Travel agents are no longer necessary to secure the lowest airfare or most desirable seat on the plane. Instead, the store-front travel agent has been largely replaced by intuitive, user-friendly search engines and strategically curated websites targeting travelers of every budget for any destination. Online search has made travel planning available to the masses, tapping latent markets and creating new standards through customer-based travel review sites. User adoption has been overwhelming; however, a cadre of travel professionals has carved out niche specialties where individual, human interaction is desirable and sought.

What lessons can the legal industry learned from travel agents? Stay tuned for Renee Newman Knake (MSU Law School), Andy Daws (Riverview Law), James Peters (LegalZoom) and my article for the Georgetown Law Symposium on The Shrinking Pyramid: Implications for Law Practice and the Legal Profession, April 12, 2013.

BT believes it has built a team with significant legal and claims handling expertise and has both market credibility and the perfect platform to not only serve its existing clientele but also win new clients. Will clients trust a telecom company with its legal issues? BT believes so: “As we carry the BT name we understand just how important it is to best represent and protect our clients’ brands, which will remain as a main component of our service strategy.”

As Larry Bridgesmith points out in a twitter post: “Imagine AT&T opens a law firm providing corporate law services on a fixed fee basis. Just happened in the UK.”  A question of time?!

Agenda:

Emerging Trends in Buying Legal Services is held in a TED-Style Discussion—Law firms and corporate law departments will collaboratively examine the value of competitive bidding, RFP processes, developing competitive intelligence, and benchmarking to gain a competitive edge.

Workshop Collaboration: Establishing Value-Based Pricing & AFAs—Hear and discuss concrete examples of how AFA programs have been successfully implemented, managed, and evaluated to better predict legal spend, become more efficient, and enhance value.

Workshop Results & Discussion: Scope, Baseline, Benchmark, Value—End the day with a collective discussion of workshop findings mapped to four defined pillars—Scope, Baseline, Benchmark, Value—that provide a blueprint for improving business behavior.

Register for the conference

Upcoming LegalVIEW Forums:

• May 16 in Washington, DC: Case study Analysis: Improving Certainty of Budgeting & Forecasting
• July 18 in Chicago: Sourcing Legal Providers in a Changing Business Environment (Legal Procurement)
• September 26 in Los Angeles: Negotiation Strategies for Corporations & Law Firms

Law schools, he argues, should adopt a program aimed at creating a new generation of hybrid lawyers/business developers.  ”The combination of these abilities would provide the legal profession with a highly sophisticated, institutional sales force capable of generating new revenue at the highest levels of corporations, governments and other prospective clients – throughout the world.” This is a discipline sophisticated enough to warrant formal acknowledgement and study both within the legal academy and within the practicing profession.

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