Peer to Peer Magazine

Chris Emerson Director of the Practice Economics Group at Bryan Cave, LLP Stuart Dodds Director of Global Pricing & Legal Project Management at Baker & McKenzie My background is in software development. About 12 years ago, I wrote our financial dashboard, which subsequently was licensed to Redwood. In conjunction with that, I worked on our financial warehouse, cost allocation system and handled a lot of executive financial reporting. Supporting those applications, I learned a great deal about law firm economics and the business of law. About five years ago, I started pricing alternative fee arrangements and setting up systems to manage them to budget. The volume of requests continued to increase, so the firm decided we needed to dedicate attention to the opportunity, and my current role was created in 2010.  I have a background in management consulting, initially with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) for 14 years, and then for a smaller strategic procurement consultancy. I was then approached by Linklaters to become their first global head of pricing, with them looking to take advantage of my procurement and analytical background. What are your primary areas of responsibility, and who do you report to in the firm? Toby: My responsibilities include pricing, process improvement, legal project management and practice innovation. For pricing, my role spans everything from client negotiations to profit modeling and financial monitoring. I report to the COO. Chris: I am responsible for pricing, budgeting, legal project management and the continued development of the financial tool suite we have created. We also support certain complex executive reporting needs. I report to our strategic innovation partner (who reports to the chairman) with a dotted line to practice management and another dotted line to our COO. In practice, though, I report to every partner in the firm. Bearing that in mind enables me to focus on the important problems first. Stuart: I'm responsible for providing targeted pricing development, negotiation and project management support to partners and coworkers responsible for the firm's major clients; the development and implementation of our global pricing and project management capability; and ongoing management and review of key commercial relationships across the firm's 74 offices worldwide. I report directly to our global director of business development and marketing but have a very strong dotted line to our CFO and executive committee. Vincent: I concentrate on value service and pricing, client negotiations, pitch support, matter staffing, client budgets, taskbased billing, business process improvement, matter management, project management and practice innovation. My role also includes profit modeling as well as financial and service-level reporting. I report to the CKO. Peer to Peer 113

• Cover