>> My name is John Ferco [assumed spelling].
I'm the Director of Strategic Pricing and Practice Management
for 200 person law firm in the DC Metro area.
It means pricing with a purpose.
In law firms, people have just been increasing rates for five percent a year for as long
as anyone could remember and here, you're using pricing to benefit the clients as well
as make things more profitable for the firm.
You're looking at what things cost which can vary
because different people perform the services so it can be much more expensive,
much less expensive depending on how the lawyer works,
what their habits are and things like that.
The second part of that is figuring out what the client needs.
In the old time-- in the old days, lawyers would just start working,
assuming they knew what the clients needed.
Here, we do very in-depth interviews to figure out what their goals are
and it might not just be the goals of the organization, but the department,
the actual, individual you're working for.
And then third is the negotiating aspect.
A lot of people just think of pricing as an economic or finance tool,
but in reality there's a lot of sales and negotiation involved also.
But I'll give you one example that I'd like to give.
In the last 15 years, I would say most attorneys, when they quote a price
for a project, the client would just say, "Hey, can you do a little better than that?"
And the lawyer, even though they maybe a master negotiator would say,
"Well, let me see what I can."
And they come back and give them 10 percent off.
What I do is prepare the lawyers so that they can go through with the client and say, "Well,
let's look at the ten steps that we have to do for this case.
Let's see which ones you want to include, which ones you don't want to include.
Maybe you want to bring some of the things in house to be a little cheaper.
Maybe you want to outsource some to be cheaper."
So we go through step by step by step and at the end, the client is saying "I want you
to do this" or "I don't want you to do this."
And at the end-- and of course at the end, you know,
they can make the price less expensive by opting to get less service.
The other aspect of my job is practice management
and that is the overall strategy business planning
for the different practice groups in a law firm.
So it's like being a mini-COO or executive director of business unites.