Digital White Papers

THE PRICING PROFESSIONAL'S KM TOOLKIT on how a given firm has implemented enterprise content search, it can be another very useful KM tool for pricing people. The ability to search and sort documents can help identify deliverables and tasks for unfamiliar legal processes. As an example, if one needed to create a budget for a divestiture that would involve an auction but knew relatively little about what was involved, one could look first in the experience database to find a few comparable matters by using enterprise content search. This would allow one to look at each document created in chronological order and see what is generated during the typical process. Although this process probably will not identify every task needed for the budget, the search will help identify many of them and minimize the number of questions the pricing professional will need to ask the lawyers. The ability to search for matters across the enterprise is common. The search typically indexes not only the documents created, but also time entries, experience database records and information from the intake system. Matter searching enables pricing professionals to find comparable matters easily either through Boolean searches or by searching within results. For example, a pricing professional could search first by "breach of contract" to find all such cases and then refine the results by searching for cases that also include TILA and RESPA issues. The final results typically contain some good comparable matters. Other sources of good information for pricing professionals are the existing workflow solutions used to manage matters. These come in all shapes and sizes. Some practice areas will have a tool used to manage their cases, and workflows are periodically found in support of individual client teams — particularly for portfolios of matters. These systems often document case-specific information and can include key milestone details like decision dates, allegations in the complaint or party information, such as judge or plaintiff's counsel. Workflow systems can be mined to supply information to matter experience databases or to support the understanding of important characteristics for a specific type of work that affects pricing. UNDERSTAND THE PRICING LEVERS One challenge pricing professionals commonly face is in understanding the price range for a given legal service. Without KM data, the process is extremely difficult — particularly if the attorneys involved do not have much availability to answer questions. Using corporate finance shelf registrations as a backdrop, the process to understand the pricing levers looks something like the following: •The first step is to identify as many matters as possible for that kind of service. In an ideal world, these matters would already be identified and collected in an experience database. Barring that, searching with enterprise content search or in the intake system could produce some matters. •The next step is to learn as much as possible about the subject-matter and the steps involved in completing the legal service. The idea is to get a sense of the different variables involved; Google and Wikipedia often are good research tools for this. With shelf registrations, the EDGAR database at the SEC site is also a must. Using these resources, a pricing or KM professional would discover that one variable is whether the company is located in the U.S. or elsewhere. Another variable is whether the company is a well-known issuer and can therefore use the shorter S-3 form. A third variable could be whom the firm is representing: the issuer or the underwriter. These variables are also good to document in a matter experience database for later use. •Once some good variables are identified, the next logical step is often some basic statistical data visualization and analysis. To make a visual of the data, one would start by dumping all the matters, the variable metadata

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