I spent some 30 years as a solicitor in private practice, the last nine of them as Managing Partner and CEO of a successful regional law firm, one which I helped move from being a ‘High Street’ general practice to being a credible alternative to city-based competitors, and to a place in the UK top 200.
I am a former Chair of the Law Management Section of the Law Society (now Leadership and Management Section), editor of the same Section’s Merger Toolkit and an alumnus of Harvard Business School’s Leading Professional Service Firms course.
I began my consultancy work in 2013. Initially offering value pricing, mergers & acquisitions, and leadership support, I now focus on pricing, while providing a handful of firms’ leadership teams with constructive challenge and support.
I work with law firm leaders to help re-set strategy and challenge the way things get done (or don’t) in the firm, then help support them in overcoming obstacles to progress. I employ the phrase ‘a critical friend’ to describe this role, which may be as a Non-Executive Director or similar, subject to retainer, or on an ad hoc project basis.
My interest in Pricing was sparked by working with my former colleague Richard Burcher back in 2012. I subsequently worked with Burcher Jennings from 2014 to early 2022. I have been working in Pricing under my own name since March 2022. I am a Teaching Fellow in Pricing on the Master of Legal Business course at the College of Law Australia. I have trained some 100 firms (from niche sole practitioner through to top 50 firms) in pricing, and worked in more than 10 jurisdictions.
As my recent blog series makes clear, Pricing is where lawyers’ increasing use of AI intersects with clients’ expectation of reduced fees. Judgment is what clients now look for from their law firms, as increasingly knowledge, research and drafting become all but free via AI. Judgment (which encompasses experience, wisdom, strategy & advocacy) leads directly to a conversation about value, not how long something takes. And because the difficulty with that is consistency and scalability, I’m building a pricing platform to help. It’s called IntelliPrice®, and you can find a holding website here.