Redefining Law Firm Culture: Creating Value Through Innovation

Thank you so much for having me. And listen, just like TikTok, we can have a part two and leave a cliffhanger so people join.

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That's right. So we are a very much partner focused firm, of course, but also we want the partners to have the ability to bring on the resources that they need to make their practice successful. So we don't want to have a defined pool. We don't wanna have to create additional overhead and have additional headcount that isn't being fully utilized. So to the extent that partners can maintain additional support staff for their teams to deliver for their clients, then that's something that's welcome.

Yeah. And if I just take a quick step back, so Joel Ferdinand and Michael Pierson had an opportunity to basically say, if we started a law firm from the ground up, how would we want to build our firm? How would we want to build the firm that we want to work at? And so they really started diving into all of those things that make an organization, a firm, successful, and that starts with people.

Right? So how do you make sure that you bring the people in that you want to go to work with every day, that you don't mind jumping on the phone with every day? And so when they're thinking about the partners that they were going to bring over with them, they spent a lot of time thinking about who are those people that we like and that our clients like. And then as we've continued to grow over the past eighteen, nineteen months, the interview process is the same.

Even if they have a big book of business, even if that book of business is portable and be really fun to have, if that's not someone that they would wanna work with every day, then they don't have a seat at the table at Pierson Ferdinand. So really starts there, and then they just foster that culture. So we have a firm retreat coming up in two weeks where there's about over two hundred, I think ninety percent of the firm is showing up to this retreat in Stowe, Vermont. Can't wait for that.

And Joel and Michael know people's birthdays. They know spouses' birthdays. They know anniversaries. They send out cards.

They really talk to people. If people are having personal issues in their life, they do everything they can to support that person through those issues. It really is and I've never experienced this in my twenty plus years of being in the industry, something as special as what they've built.

So I am the chief innovation officer. And because we run a pretty lean shop, that means a number of different things on any given day. But I spend most of my time understanding where technology, where process improvement can add value in two different fronts. One, from the back office perspective.

What can we do to create a better frictionless kind of atmosphere for our partners in the administrative tasks? So those tasks that no one wants to do, but has to be done because that's just what you need to do. So what are those things that we can automate, and what are those things that we can put against workflow so that way our partners can really focus on practicing law? And then the second part of that is what are those different things that we can do to continue to drive value to our clients?

That might be through technology. That might be through rethinking billing practices. That might be through, you know, working together to build software. I have a number of different clients that are interested in collaborating with us on building things together that don't exist in the marketplace.

But what are those drivers that can allow the partners to bring value to their clients? So I spend most of my time doing that, and I adore it. But the other part of my time is thinking about how do we buy differently. Right?

So a lot of the technology companies are set up to think about, oh, Pierson Ferdinand has two hundred and fifty partners. Therefore, I'm gonna get an enterprise license for two hundred and fifty partners. And I have to say, okay. Let's back up a little bit here.

Of the two hundred and fifty partners, twenty five percent might find value from your product because of the different practice areas that we have. Of that twenty five percent, I think we'll probably have two or three people who are willing to use that product for their practice because the others might you know, if we think about it again, I'm focused on IP, and that's the area that I actually know the least amount. But if you do trademarks, right, that's very different than if you do patents. So if you're a patent product, my trademark partners are never going to use you, so I'm not going to buy based on their headcount.

So really working with outside providers on how to rethink their billing model to align to what I consider the law firm of today and the law firm of the future. We're not gonna buy for shelfware. We're not gonna buy because of how many people we have. We're gonna buy on what we can use and how that's going to bring value to our clients or to our our internal business.

Well, they have the potential misfortune of my career background. And so my career background has been mostly in sales, and it's been in startup world, and it's been through high growth kind of organizations through exit. I kind of have the insider scoop on what they can and cannot do, especially based on potentially their investment cycle. Right?

Do they need to close another round, and do they need a new logo? That's interesting for me to know. Are we coming up to an end of quarter? That's interesting for me to know.

Do we have go to market opportunities together where we might be able to do some co marketing together? I know that brings value. They know that brings value. So if we can put a whole bunch of different kind of value drivers that bring value to them, you know, aside from just the dollars, because that's obviously what we need at the end of the day.

And if they can bring value to me, what I found is that most of them are very, very willing to work on new ways of engagement and new models. There's a couple of very mature players out there, and, unfortunately, they have a lot of power to do what they want. But I think for the most part, the really agile emerging tech companies are very willing to align to what we need to do because I can buy quickly. Right?

And that that's a driver as well. And there are other things that I'll I'll do. So I'll try to have a minimum commitment. Right?

So if I say, hey. If we can get at least five partners to sign up for that, would that be enough to make this a value to you? Sometimes that's a yes. Sometimes it's a little bit higher.

But, yeah, there's a number of different levers that I'll I'll pull to assure that they're getting the value from us and we're getting value from them. Because, again, being in sales at the end of the day, you wanna help them out too. Right? You don't wanna you don't wanna beat them up too much.

I found this new IP tool that might be beneficial to you. Would you like to take a look at it? So you have to sell.

I have to do a lot of selling. I hate the words change management. I wanna meet the people where they are, and I wanna provide them with as many opportunities for success. And so when I bring in a new product, if they will align to what we can do from a buying perspective, then I am a hardcore internal salesperson.

I provide, you know, multiple trainings, maybe even a month on a particular product. I reach out beyond that product's, demographic. So let's say it's a transactional tool. I'll open it up to the litigation team because the litigation team might say, hey.

You know, I have a client that has a lot of transactions coming up. I'm going to refer them to my partner in the transaction team knowing that they're using this transactional tool, which is a value driver because we can create efficiencies or we can potentially have better outcomes based on the amount of data we can review. So it's a full kind of circular way of trying to promote what I think are kind of best in class products that will bring again, it's all about driving value at the end of the day. But, yeah, I do a lot of internal sales.

You'll have to talk to Joel and Michael.

I think what they were able to identify is that we are all adults. We are all professionals, and we are going to work to ensure that we are representing our clients to the best of our ability, and you don't need an office to do that. And because we don't have an office and based on my experience in offices, you know, not necessarily at law firms, we're constant communication.

Right? You're not sitting behind closed walls within your office and not talking to anyone that's in the office next to you. Because out of necessity, we don't have this bench of associates or paralegal professionals who are going to do things. You're on the phone with your other partners.

You're strategizing with your other partners. The competition amongst other partners isn't what you would see at other law firms, I suspect. And so there is just this constant engagement amongst the firm, and then we have firm retreats. We have networking events for the firm.

We have, you know, social hours that we'll go to different cities and get everyone together. So we're not disconnected at all. But I think we're also shockingly not siloed in many ways, especially when, you know, you're bringing over your book and you're just part of a small representation of what could be a much bigger portfolio for a particular customer or category.

You wanna share ideas. Right? So our insurance team, United, and we have, I think, sixty or so of our partners who have raised their hand to say, for insurance industries, I can offer this value. So if we have new insurance companies that come up, we have a group of again, I think it's around sixty.

I don't know the exact number, but that's close to it, who will say, okay. What does that insurance company need? Here's my experience. What can I do to help?

It's all hands on deck. It's incredible. It it makes all the sense in the world, and why has it taken us so long to get there. Right?

Yeah. And anytime there's some type of, you know, disagreement, and, of course, there's always going to be some type of disagreement, and we're not that unique.

Joel and Michael are incredible moderators. Right? They'll understand the situation.

They'll kind of arbitrate between whatever is going on, and then they just make a decision. And that's the decision, and we move on from it.

And that's it.

And I'm not one of the producing partners. Right? So I'm not really in there, like, fighting for anything and nor do I see people fighting for anything. So maybe there's some of that going on, but being in the c suite, it usually would bubble up to what I would see, and I just haven't really seen a lot or or any of it to really, like, say, well, actually, there are these highs. Right? And but I have seen Joel and Michael say, you know, there were these concerns, and this is the decision we came to. And then people just just move on and continue to focus on the clients.

Yeah. I mean, you think about those different things that go into what the charges are. Right? So what the rates are going to be.

You think about you have to pay for office space. You have to pay for guaranteed salaries. You have to pay for technologies that you might be experimenting with because you bought an enterprise license, and you're not doing a chargeback model to your partners. And so the way we're able to reduce all those costs and pass those savings on to our clients is just by that.

Right? So we make very smart purchasing decisions. We're very good at ensuring that the decisions that we make, the partners are contributing to that. So if if you wanna license with an AI tool, then you're paying for that.

Our rates, our rack rates are typically somewhere between thirty to fifty percent of the AMLAW ten, the AMLAW two hundred because, again, we don't have the overhead that those firms have.

That's right.

And I think a lot of it and, you know, moving it back to the tech side a little bit. So there's a lot of fear and certainty and doubt around just technology in general, especially within the legal community. Right? Like, we are based our careers are based on precedent.

So what did our forefathers do? Then that's what I need to do. So when you come in and say, okay. Well, we're gonna change the way your forefathers had worked, and we're gonna do something that's more modern that our clients are demanding.

Right? So being in house at Citi, I would see our law firms demanding just we were their clients. Like, no. No.

No. Like, we're, like, breaking that mold a little bit. But I had a demonstration of a litigation tool, and I was showing a couple of my litigation partners. And this tool is amazing.

And the partner basically said, well, Christina, that work typically would take me five days to do. And I give this example a lot when I'm I'm speaking, and I said, listen. That work is dead. You just don't know it yet.

Right? So let's get ahead of it. Let's recognize. Let's be the first to the table.

Let's adopt that because what we're then showing to our clients is that we are willing to do what it takes to create efficiency, to drive the value. In the short term, it might look like we're reducing our revenue. They're reducing their spend. But in the long term, let's play the long game, and let's go after volume.

Let's get the client trust that we really are trying to work in their favor and then build up that relationship so that way we have a deeper, more meaningful relationship with that client. So if we have to lose five days on the front end to get a more penetrating relationship with that potentially very large client, then that's a short term sacrifice to make. And by the way, that five days of work, you don't wanna be doing it anyway. Right.

Oh, absolutely.

So there's a number of different layers to that. So the first layer when I'm evaluating technology before I even introduce it into a law firm is just security. Before I even know if the technology works or not, I wanna know about the organization. I wanna know what type of security it has.

Because if it doesn't meet my minimum kind of threshold requirements, then there's no point in even seeing if it's a cool and shiny product. And the second part is getting past me. Right? I'm gatekeeper in the way that I can I can smell some demo magic?

I'm not suggesting that anytime in my career, I may have had teams that did any demo magic, but I'm pretty good at sniffing out, right, what could be a really good offering. And then I'll bring in a small group of partners that would have a significant stake and say, this looks good. It passes kind of the smell test. You're the real lawyer.

You tell me. If this works as warranted, does this bring you and your client value? If the answer to that is yes, then I just negotiate the deal that makes sense for that particular practice group. And what I'm focused on right now is building essentially an internal marketplace.

So I'm only a gatekeeper to ensure that the technology meets our requirements and does offer value. But I want my partners to freely be able to select the technology that they want to use. So think about it like an Amazon shopping experience. You can put the technology that you want into a cart, checkout, that whatever that price is then gets billed back to you through our distribution, and then you have to leverage that technology throughout the remainder of that contract that we have.

They're not being forced to do it. They want to use it. And because we don't have the associates, I have been so pleasantly surprised with how many of my partners show up to learn more about tech. Right?

And we're partners. So these men and women have been practicing for thirty, twenty, thirty years. Like, we're we're not talking about associates who are just coming out of college who know how to use prompts or have for help with prompts. Right?

These are people who have been practicing their whole career without them and have been successful at it, and now they're still willing to take a look. So we have a hackathon that we're going to support at our retreat. I have probably seventy five percent of my partners have signed up for one on one sessions with some of the technology sponsors at our retreat because they're very hungry to learn how to use it.

I focus very much on grassroots. Right? Every person has their concerns. Every person has their uncertainty around it.

So I just have the conversation with them and just say, let's take a look at it. Right? And by the way, it might not offer your practice any value. I don't know.

But let's let's take a look at it together. And a lot of these emerging tech companies, their user experience, their user interface is so easy. Yeah. It's not hard for them to really pick up on how easy it is to use.

And they realize that, I think, twenty something years ago, you could break something. Right? Like, if you press the wrong button or you like, you could erase the entire system. You put your fingerprint on the floppy disk, like, that disk is gone.

Here, you can't really break, like, the production instances of what we're putting in front of people. So you click the wrong thing, probably not a big deal. Having them understand that, giving them the peace of mind, and then showing them the value that they could bring is huge. Right?

If you could do a fifty state jurisdictional research project in an hour versus, you know yeah. It just it totally changes changes the game.

I just love the atmosphere of this conference, first of all. It's a little bit smaller. People are much more connected. The other thing I really like about this year in particular is that I've signed up to be a coach mentor because I've held pretty much every position you can hold within the legal universe.

And, there's a lot of people who don't understand or don't know what their path is going to be. So I've had multiple sessions while I've been here to just tell people, like, if you're interested in going from a service start up to a tech start up, here's my journey doing that. If you're interested in going to a high growth organization through an exit, here are the considerations you need to have. You wanna move from a tech startup to an in house position.

You know, here's my journey to get there. Here are all those things, and here's how you can add value, and here's how you market yourself as adding value, and here's what you need to think about from a networking perspective. So for me, I like to give back. At least this year is giving back.

Right? Giving back to the people who've helped me get to where I've gone, and hopefully, I can help them get to wherever they want to go.

Thank you so much for having me. This has been great. Hopefully, there will be a part two.