Mother in Law: Scott Simmons, rainmaker maker

This week, I spoke to Scott Simmons of Legal Balance. He is a consultant and coach who ‘turns lawyers into rainmakers’. 

MIL: My first question: what does this mean?

SS: Imagine you are creating rain – making it rain. Now, I want you to replace the water with great clients and work that you love doing. Let’s go further: you’re not just making it rain work and clients for yourself, you’re making it rain for colleagues and contacts because you are so good at what you do. And at the heart of all of this is the client – thinking about their best outcomes and results.

MIL: Should all lawyers seek to be well-rounded? Or should firms play to people’s personalities and strengths?

SS: I fundamentally believe that lawyers should be trained to win work as well as do it.

The practice of law as we know it is changing right before us. AI is going to completely upend everything that we have been taught about our role as lawyers.

A lawyer’s future isn’t in drafting or researching. Advising clients, getting underneath the surface of what a client thinks they want or need and uncovering their goals and challenges. Being a trusted adviser who sits at the strategic table before decisions are made. To do that, lawyers need the skills that business development (BD) builds – the kind of communication skills we are not taught at law school.

BD has no connection to an individual’s personality – every lawyer can learn to be a rainmaker, so while some might appear to have greater strengths in this, everyone can learn those skills.

MIL: How will the legal business model change in the next 10 or 20 years? You are talking to someone whose managing partner said ABSs would be the end of the law firm.

'AI will give lawyers back 50% of their time through augmentation and automation. That means lawyers can only bill clients half as much. And no client will accept a lawyer’s charge-out rate doubling because their effort has halved'

Scott Simmons

SS: Ha! And see? The legal profession didn’t implode. AI presents a whole new challenge to the traditional legal business model – and an opportunity.

I love AI and use it every day. It is transforming businesses and industries everywhere. The idea that it won’t transform the legal profession is beyond naive; it’s dangerous.

At its very core, AI is a productivity tool. It speeds up your outputs, so it either gives you back time or allows you to do more with the time you have.

Let’s take the billable hour: if predictions are correct, AI will give lawyers back around 50% of their time through augmentation and automation. That means lawyers can only bill clients half as much. And no client will accept a lawyer’s charge-out rate doubling because their effort has halved. We’ve spent the last 50 years selling time – we can’t now argue that because our time has gone down, our charge-out rate has to go up.

The billable hour is done for. It won’t go down quietly, but it can’t withstand this kind of progress.

The future of the legal profession is lawyers using AI to gain more time to advise clients and being paid for their value, not their time.

MIL: So you don’t like the billable hour? If a builder wanted to charge me by the hour, or day, I would run a mile, so I am inclined to agree. I also agree with the idea of scoping work in advance (which we should all be doing already), and I hate time recording. But I have some questions:

a) How would a manager keep a check on someone’s productivity and capacity without seeing their chargeable time?

b) As a young lawyer, I used to find costs estimates incredibly difficult, particularly when my hourly rate seemed so high. How can firms help lawyers with this?

c) What alternative charging structures have you seen work well?

SS: I hate the billable hour. It’s the worst thing that ever happened to the profession. If you want to understand the decline in how people view lawyers, or the root cause of most of the profession’s problems – from culture to customer service, from stress to burnout and suicide – you can track it back to the billable hour. But to your questions:

a) Time-recording doesn’t measure productivity – it measures how long you’ve sat at your desk. Parkinson’s law states that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. In the legal profession, work expands to fill timesheets. Lawyers push back when I say this, but one anonymous survey revealed that 35% of lawyers admitted to padding their timesheets.

We should treat all legal matters as projects, with team members assigned tasks that they are best at doing and every task given a deadline for completion. The more you complete a task, the quicker you do it – that is a much better assessment of productivity than a timesheet. As long as team members meet deadlines, why do you need to know how long it takes them?

b) Pricing is part science, part art. Scoping plays an important role. Lawyers often say they don’t have time to scope. The industry average for write-offs is 15%-20%. So we can write off 20% of our time, but we can’t find 15-90 minutes to properly scope a matter that would likely mean we wouldn’t write off so much of that time?

This comes down to training from the very top of the business down. Even the most senior lawyers need training on pricing and scoping.

Then use technology to collate data that would help guide us better in pricing. Where are similar matters? What are the differences that would make us price this matter differently?

Get that right, you’ll help your lawyers greatly.

c) When I work with clients, I help them move from the billable hour to value pricing and subscriptions.

Value pricing reflects the true value that lawyers bring; it’s truly transparent and gives clients certainty.

When you buy anything, you want to know the price up front. You mentioned building works. You wouldn’t dream of allowing a builder to work on your property on an hourly rate with seemingly no end to what it could cost. Why should law firm clients accept it?

We ask clients to believe that we have all this experience in matters, yet when a client asks for a price, we tell them we can’t possibly do that. How does that make sense? If you’ve seen it all before, you should be able to say the price will be based on an agreed scope.

I also love the subscription model. It’s built on the principles of value pricing, but it allows you to take the pricing conversation off the table at the very outset and be fully focused on the relationship.

You work out the client’s ongoing needs and how you will resource them, then price it so the client pays the same amount monthly.

MIL: How do you feel about firms that make staff record non-chargeable time?

SS: The same as I feel about law firms that make their lawyers record their chargeable time – it’s pointless. It’s not how much time you spend doing chargeable or non-chargeable work, it’s how effective you are with the time you spend doing it.

Outcomes are what matter, not inputs. Send a lawyer off to do BD on their own, and they’ll book loads of lunches and golf days with nothing to show for it. Teach a lawyer how to do BD effectively and they’ll win plenty of work for the firm without putting a load more pressure on their already packed schedule.

 

Scott Simmons is a coach, trainer and consultant. See legalbalance.co.uk