Nearly every BigLaw firm now has a pricing director; meet an early adopter
In the last 18 months, nearly ever large law firm in the United States has hired a pricing director, according to the vice president of an analytics company.
These pricing directors are “charged with helping to look at their pricing and determine if they’re being as competitive as possible,” according to Craig Raeburn, vice president and managing director of legal analytics at TyMetrix, which has information on $45 billion in legal bills. Information Week spoke with Raeburn for its profile of Christopher Emerson, who became director of practice economics at Bryan Cave in 2010.
Emerson started work at Bryan Cave 17 years ago as a software development manager. In his latest job, he figures out up-front pricing for set legal projects, the story says. His 11-person group started using TyMetrix data this year to compare Bryan Cave’s costs to other firms. Emerson was an “early adopter,” Raeburn says.
Emerson’s team also developed a program called Tasker that analyzes how lawyers spend their time, and a text-analytics program that catches terms that create red flags for clients. “We had one client call and say ‘I see this bill is littered with the word strategize. Is that all you guys do?’ ” Emerson said.
Related coverage:
ABA Journal: “How lawyers are mining the information mother lode for pricing, practice tips and predictions”
