Hi there,
Earlier this week, our team presented a first-of-its-kind webinar on managing outside legal spend, featuring Tamara Franks, Head of Operations, Group General Counsel at Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), the UK’s largest pension fund by AUM.
What made this virtual event so valuable for the enterprise legal teams who attended?
USS is the first of our customers to have integrated PERSUIT with Apperio. For those of you unfamiliar, Apperio enables real-time visibility of a law firm’s work in progress and accruals, which allows teams to proactively manage legal spend before a matter gets to invoice.
When paired with PERSUIT’s robust matter scoping and RFP capabilities, along with our competitive sourcing — well, as you can imagine, the pairing is quite powerful. Tamara’s team has only even recently considered bringing on e-billing because of the degree of pricing leverage and transparency the PERSUIT-Apperio integration has enabled.
By establishing a value-based price from the outset and then using Apperio to track work in process, USS has made big strides in controlling their outside counsel spend, which has helped them make the case for additional investments in their program.
If you haven’t already, I highly suggest you watch the webinar replay.
But if I were to distill it down into one takeaway, I would use the old expression, “happiness comes from setting proper expectations.”
Here’s what I mean:
1. Start at the beginning.
For USS, setting those expectations comes at the beginning, establishing transparent value-based pricing at matter inception.
Conventional wisdom says that firms would be reluctant to use this approach, but Franks has found the opposite:
“I've actually been quite surprised how welcoming law firms are to this kind of thing. I assumed ‘oh, another system, don't really want to do this, want to do it the same old way,’ type arguments coming out. But actually, systems like PERSUIT offer greater transparency and therefore they can see why they're winning or losing or where things are going wrong.”
2. Communicate with data.
Once engaged, USS monitors each matter to see how firms are adhering to their initial quote.
This not only helps both parties avoid awkward conversations around billing disputes, but it also provides a trove of data.
USS tracks the level of spend with each firm, along with any value adds each firm provides. From this, USS creates a scorecard twice yearly that tells firms what percentage of spend they’ve had across work streams and ranks firms on factors like value for money.
3. Proactively educate firms on what “good” looks like.
The blame often falls on firms when they fail to perform to clients’ expectations. But the truth is that many clients fall short in helping their firms understand their unique situation and how they need their firms to show up to help them solve for those challenges.
“The fact is, if you don't educate your firm, they're actually hindered from truly understanding you as a client,” Franks said. And misunderstanding can lead to duplication of efforts and diminishing value for the client.
USS works proactively via roundtables and real-time data-backed communications to make sure their firms understand the business and the issues it’s facing.
Thinking back on my days as a BigLaw managing partner, I would have loved a cheat sheet that showed our clients’ thinking on pricing, value adds – what they really wanted out of their firm/client relationship.
Tamara summed up the heart of her approach best with this one bit of advice:
“There's the commercial aspects, absolutely. But in terms of who you want to advise you, you've ultimately got to trust them, and they've got to want to invest in you. And if you can't get those human levels, right? The financial aspects won't really matter because you won't decide to use them.”
You can catch the full replay here.
And if you’d like to learn more about how our PERSUIT-Apperio integration can power a more productive partnership with your team’s firms, just hit reply, and a member of my team will be in touch.
Cheers,
-Jim
