One of my old jokes I used to use arose out of lawyer questions about “AFAs.” Lawyers would ask, How can you tell if an AFA will be successful? My answer: I have caller ID. The point being that success came with lawyers willing to focus on the numbers. And I already knew who those lawyers were.
This answer has changed over time. Now-a-days the answer is: When the client’s legal operations people are involved. When a law firm pricing person can engage directly with a client-side “pricing person” the resulting pricing deal (f.k.a. AFA) will be win-win and we get there a lot faster.
I recently published an article on the topic of Legal Operations, but it’s too long to be a blog post (hint hint Casey) so I am just posting a link to it here. It explores how the legal operations roles are growing in number and becoming more aligned with the emerging law firm roles around pricing, legal project management and the like.
This development has an excellent chance of driving practical change (finally) in the legal industry.