Providing clear pricing and financial management to meet client demands and deliver internal control and enhanced profitability.

Pricing Strategy Formation 

- Identifying business realities and objectives across jurisdictions, practices and sectors to formulate the business strategy. 

- Client and practice strategies formulated and aligned to minimise conflicting patterns of pricing behaviour and clarify to the market and internally where they exist. 

- Client messaging agreed, aligned and communicated. Market facing position settled and broadcast if a broader positioning in the market is required or justified.

Pricing Readiness

- Creation of policies and processes to support the pricing initiative.

- Detailing of new tasks per roles to be undertaken.

- Data preparation, including creation/updating of key taxonomies and data quality check against existing client/matter details. 

Selection & Implementation

- Vendor/tool selection 

- Business implementation, including  designing and agreeing workflow processes, agreeing on success criteria and how these are to be measured and reported.

Change Management

- Spreading awareness regarding the business change and its goals. Create wide understanding of why this initiative is important to the firm and the behavioural changes needed to make it a success.

Helping firms refocus effort on the right business priorities

Using our proven methodology we help firms review their project portfolio against the firms evolving strategy and business roadmaps.

Is your project list 

               … too long ?

               … too slow moving ?

               … too costly ?

               … backed up in lots of documents that are quite hard to read ?

               … not fully understood by the decision makers ?

Or is it 

               … well understood and easy to consume

               … properly and consistently costed

               … showing the key dependencies between projects

               … supported by management, who;

                      - appreciate the benefits, and

                      - can see the support for firm strategy and the business roadmap.

We can help the firms identify the change areas that yield the most benefits.

As the focus in this fast-moving world is agility we also help firms set up a governance framework to make swift business decisions, and a process to enable firms to carry out this exercise internally going forward.

Engaging with the right people at the right time in the right format

It’s important to be positive and sell the benefits of your project, but user’s expectations must be grounded and realistic.

We take the textbook approach of stakeholder engagement, communication, user acceptance testing & training, and then we go one step further …

Our model takes the benefits right at the start and the key stakeholder perspectives and weaves in checkpoints for them throughout the project – at the end of design, at the end of build and user testing, connecting them into data conversations to facilitate reporting, always keeping the stakeholders informed/engaged to the right extent.

Our approach appreciates that change is personal and accepts the reality that some people will only engage at the last possible minute, whatever you do.   

We can set up your change management strategy and then give you flexibility as you need more bandwidth at key points such as UAT, training & hypercare

Remember your success will not be rated on the actual delivery, but on what people think of the delivery – change management is everything! 

You can have the best time-recording system in the world but to understand your total effort and maximise profitability you need to adopt new policies, processes and behaviours.

Time recording - current state review

Following a structured and tested approach we blend feedback from clients, billers, relationship managers and partners with underlying data to give an accurate picture of captured versus actual effort, and the hidden cost of untimely and poor quality submissions.

Technical solution change?

We believe that significant benefits can be realised via policy and behavioural change, without the expense of changing technology. 

However, we also understand the benefits and costs of changing technology, and can advise accordingly.

Time solutions now offer broad solutions that fully support the lawyer e.g. capturing time on all devices, providing an aide-memoire of activities performed, and fulfil an important role in managing ethical walls and client terms. Most firms do not make use of these capabilities

Time recording is a client service

Our approach of adopting policies, with supporting metrics, processes and promoting behavioural change rebrands good time recording not only as a fundamental client service (more important now that clients are demanding ever more real-time views of WIP) but as a key internal factor in being able to price and allocate work accurately.

Change management  

Based around four elements;

- Importance of good time recording to clients and the firm

- Awareness campaign regarding the under-used capture methods and the benefits of use

- What good time behaviour looks like – championing good models

- Awareness of the new measures, how they are calculated and used, and how lawyers can monitor them

Holistic review of the client matter lifecycle with senior stakeholders & the partner leadership team to focus on benefits & prioritise initiatives.

Broad initiatives

We enhance a starting list of 46 key trend areas , and their touchpoints across the client/matter lifecycle, with other initiatives that support the vision and business plan of the firm.

Often these initiatives are turned into specific projects, but this does not reflect the inter-connectedness of modern businesses and systems. Solutions, business, technology and data, need to take into account the whole of the lifecycle and have an appreciation for the constraints, dependencies and impacts across the whole. 

Bedrocks for decisions

Our methodology works with senior business stakeholders to get a common consensus regarding the priorities of the business. 

The outputs provide a framework by which to set priorities and review ongoing initiatives.

It details the business case(s) for new projects and highlights dependencies on or between existing projects.

Providing business data to drive supporting actions

Providing Data to the Business

Lawyers don't think in terms of data sets, they just want immediate answers to their business questions;

- How are my matters progressing against estimate?

- Am I overbudget?

- Will I meet my appraisal benchmarks? etc. 

We can help firms design the next level of management information to lawyers and senior management that answers the above and more.

Based on your business requirements and your KPIs, we can design a solution that is;

- a one stop shop for client, matter and performance management informatiuon

- role based for responsibilities and desired actions

- security conscious (takes account of ethical walls and client sensitivities)

- 'real-time' simple graphs and grids that provide drill downs into the detailed data 

- progress against generic measures/performance indicators 

- a self-service reporting suite, both stand-alone & embedded within dashboard pages.

Strategic Business Intelligence Technical Layer

Creation of a strategic BI Layer that;

- includes the correct business data in the correct structured format 

- provides a timely consistent view of data aligned to all source systems

- contains an architectural model (business, technology and data) flexible enough to cater for the requirements of different presentation solutions 

- is easily scalable to allow for added data domains. 

Ensuring the business is ready for the project, and the project is ready for the business

We have Magic Circle firm experience in Practice Management, Business Intake & Conflicts, Time Recording, Ethical Walls, Expenses, Pricing & Lawyer BI tools.

Establishing Governance & Structure

For our large programme we created and ran a hierarchy of steering groups and business design authorities. 

These are integral to removing firm-wide obstacles, gaining senior support, and making key business decisions

Business Eyes & Ears

Business Design 

- Ensuring the design is fit for purpose, complete and progressive

- Structuring a decision tree and providing costs, impacts and dependencies of different options

- Ensuring businesses understand the early data decisions that need to be made regarding planning the migration and cleansing work.

Smooth Delivery 

- Designing user testing to meet project needs while also building stakeholder confidence and testing the change management approach

- Readying users for the system switch off, the downtime, the switch on, the first transactions, the first month end, and beyond.

Ensuring the programme team, the vendors, the technology, the data, the users, the stakeholders are informed and in line with each other at every stage

Supporting Project Teams

With our wide project/program experience we can progress areas of the project that have slipped behind or are awaiting resources, e.g. creation of a detailed project plan (with supported budget and resource plan), creation of a change management approach and materials, creation of the cutover plan, with options etc. 

Choosing the right solution for the current/future business and technology landscape, that best aligns with the firms' aspirations.

Proven Methodology

Using a proven methodology, supported by a full suite of tools and templates, with it's roots in the financial sector, we take firms through the multiple stages of choosing the right vendor, applcation and implementation consultants.

Our approach does not just encompass the business stakeholders but addresses the needs of technology, InfoSec, Procurement and marketing teams. 

We guide and manage our clients transparently through the process, making decisions easier by presenting clear concise options alongsode their strengths and weaknesses.

Experience

We have led multiple selection initiatives covering a broad spectrum of legal applications (everything from CRM to PMS), totalling several hundred million pounds.