Reimagining Legal Billing Innovation: Value Over Hours

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. So as you mentioned, I head up our legal operations team. We like to call ourselves legal innovation technology and analytics.

My team specifically supports our supply chain Americas region, so I do have other global counterparts that we partner a lot together on a lot of our initiatives, a lot of our projects, a lot of the same processes and solutions that we're putting in place together. I've been in this space for about ten years now, and it has been a very long journey to get to where we're going. But it has been so exciting and constantly changing.

You know, it's interesting as a logistics company, you may have not been exposed to some of the math and science that a logistics company actually does. So tell us a little bit about your experience walking through the legal department at DHL, working for a logistics company that has all those demands on six sigma and means to measure and basically running their work every day with lots and lots of math and science.

I did not have experience in this area when I stepped into the role. I really grew up within this role within DHL. And when I stepped into the role, legal operations was fairly new within the organization itself. So legal operations grew up within DHL at the same time I did.

It was, you know, pretty new. There was a lot to learn for myself as well as the team in the department. So you mentioned Six Sigma. There was a lot of project management experience we had to learn, and we learned that from the business.

We learned that from talking to our our business partners. We leveraged a lot of what they were doing in the day to day, just understanding what worked well for them, and we brought that into our legal department and really made it work for us.

So in the session, we purposely didn't mention AI because I think there's still a lot to be seen, and I did not want to speculate because I still am not sure. I mean, we're still exploring a lot here. But one of the things that we really talked about is it's just really important to work with your stakeholders and understand your business and understand what's important to them to define that value. And it's gonna be different across practice areas, across countries, even sometimes down to your individual attorney that you're working with and trying to define that value with.

And so I think an opportunity where AI can come into play is when you have, you know, historical dataset, if you are able to, you know, feed some of those, I'll say, particular pieces of information that may change depending on, you know, country, practice area, matter type, even the individual attorney that it relates to, AI can help you get to that piece of information better and faster to maybe help you define that value and get to those relevant summaries that you're then proposing to your firms and saying, you know, this is where we think the value is. This is where we may wanna focus our pricing and help us get there.

So one of the things that we talked to our outside counsel about is we were very open and honest with what our business needed and where some of our constraints were. One of our first, I'll say, pilot. When we first started these discussions, I'll just call it a pilot. We said, you know, we're having a lot of constraints.

We have very high spend here. We have a very high volume, but we really need to focus on outcomes because we're not having the best success and it's creating a lot of issues. We're having a lot of reserve issues. It's really putting a strain on our business in this specific country.

So we need to figure something out. So we are very transparent, open, and honest with a very particular firm that we had a long standing relationship with. And we just started the conversation of how can we change what's happening because the current model that we have in place isn't working. And not only is it not working because of what we're paying continuously, but also it's not working because we're not actually getting the results that we need.

And so we started the conversation. We had historical data, and they had their own data that we did put together. And we started to look and say, if we can achieve these types of results, then we would hope to be able to pay you, you know, x amount. And so we didn't start just by saying, we're gonna pay you this and then, you know, we expect these results.

We took it in baby steps. And as we started to achieve the results we wanted, we were then able to say, okay. Well, you're able to get us the results that we're looking for. So let's start to pay you this amount, and let's get away from that hourly billing.

Well, I think some of what we talked about in the session is it's really important to have a good handle on your data. Not only you internally, but then the firms that you're working with, they also need to understand their data if they're able to bring that to the table as well. Because, yes, you have the data that's available to you. It's your own internal data, but they have yours as well as many other clients that could provide a little bit better picture, and they may be able to provide a little bit more creative solutions than even you think are available.

I will say our foray into benchmark data started probably six or seven years ago, and it started with just benchmarking internally our firms, what we were paying our firms against each other in similar practice areas, similar jurisdictions.

And then from there, we also looked what we were paying internally. So we do have separate legal departments within THL, and we also use some of the same firms. So we also looked at the rates we were paying across legal departments. That was an interesting time.

We resolved some things there. And then once we looked at that, we then started bringing in external industry benchmarking. There's a ton available out there. We started bringing that in and recognizing where we were, where we had room for improvement, where we were paying, you know, fair rates, lower rates, but really looking at, I'll say, complex examples.

So getting into the details of getting down to, like, matter types, the jurisdictions, the classification of the attorney, like, really digging in, not just keeping it high level, but getting down into the very specific pieces of information for the attorney because we really did want comparable information.

From that, we took that into this discussion as we're moving forward and identifying value. So we had, you know, a couple years worth of us being very intentional about benchmarking our rates, making sure that we were comfortable and confident in what we were paying was, you know, pretty consistent and good. So we took that data and made sure that what we were paying, we were confident it was pretty consistent and fair rate throughout the market. And we took that into these conversations.

And when we're thinking about this value based pricing, we're kind of anticipating depending on the pricing model we're looking at. If it's portfolio pricing, we're kind of thinking of, you know, the volume that we have going on and the average rate, the type of attorney that's kind of handling those types of matters and kind of doing some of that math. And for us, understanding what that may look like, but really leaving it to the firms to come back to us of what that looks like. Obviously, we're doing a little bit of our own analysis, but the firms are coming to us and saying, you know, this is what we think this looks like.

At the end of the day, my lawyers, they're the experts. They're the ones that understand what their needs are, how they need to staff their matters. I can provide recommendations based on data, based on my understanding of the industry.

I am not a lawyer myself.

I do rely on their expertise and their knowledge of the matters that they're handling, their knowledge of the legal industry, and the attorneys that they are working with. So I do rely on their recommendation. If they're telling me that this extra twenty five percent higher rate is valid, then I'm trusting what they are saying.

I am because my attorneys also trust when I'm saying this is what our data is showing us and they will say, okay.

It is. And I think it's great. It's been a long time in the making, I think. I'll say it wasn't always like that.

It took a while for us to get here when we started leveraging our data to make recommendations on rates. It wasn't always like this. They used to push back a lot. But now, for the most part, they're saying, no.

We trust what you're saying. It's very rare that they're coming back and saying, well, no. Like, we do agree with this slightly higher rate. And it's kind of two ways.

I know quite a few people throughout the legal operations industry, And I've asked a lot of them about this conference, those that have attended, and everybody had so many great things to say about it. So, honestly, that was really the feedback is something that attracted me to it. The reference to, you know, the great content, the abundance of sessions, smaller sessions where you have the opportunity to ask questions, to converse with the speakers, the ability to network between the sessions, the one on one time that you can get with some of the vendors that you have interest in talking to. So kind of all of the above, it just seems like a great opportunity to talk with industry peers and really understand what the hot topics are, have the opportunity to figure out what some of everybody else's pain points are, maybe get some validation on what you're doing, what's working well, what's not.

I definitely will leave with a whole bunch of notes.

I will bring this back to my team. I will share my findings in a team meeting, and we'll very likely come back with a plan for how to implement some of the things that we heard and definitely talk to my GC about how to move forward with some of the things that I heard.

Thank you.