By leveraging its internal and external data, corporate law departments can greatly improve how they handle any rate increases that their outside law firms request
For years, the in-house legal team at Volkswagen Group of America, Inc. (VWGoA) used a manual, time-consuming approach to review law firm rate increase requests. Law firms would email proposals to various in-house attorneys, who in turn coordinated with legal operations professionals and leadership.
This process then kicked off a volley of communications — internal and external — and necessitated forwarding emails, PDF letters, and spreadsheets for analysis and follow-up. The legal operations team provided some central support, but this was often challenging because data limitations made it difficult to account for past rate increases and freezes across different firms. Overall, the efforts felt somewhat ad hoc and very time-consuming.
“It has always been important to us to get this right,” says Antony Klapper, Deputy General Counsel in Product Liability & Regulatory at VWGoA. “We want to be fair to our law firms, whom we view as trusted partners. At the same time, we must manage our company’s finances responsibly — and execute all of this efficiently with a leanly-staffed team.”
Trisha Fletcher, Legal Operations Specialist at VWGoA, emphasizes these points as well. “Collectively, our team had a strong desire to find a better way to do this.”
Taking a new approach
The VWGoA team launched a new initiative to process rate increase requests more effectively for 2022 and beyond — one that would ultimately win them an ACC Value Champion Award.
The first step, the team decided, was to establish a more centralized, uniform approach. This would be managed by legal operations with strategic guidance from legal leadership. Of course, there would still be coordination with in-house counsel, but in a more efficient way — built around a centralized process, featuring stronger use of data analytics, benchmarking, and core decision governance from leadership.
The next step then, was to improve the in-take process. Outside law firms were asked to submit their rate increases within a designated window of time and through a common portal. This allowed the team to consider them all together, performing side-by-side comparisons of similar firms to ensure more consistent treatment under then-current market conditions. This commonality also enabled the use of greater analytics capabilities to assess past rate increase history, as well as internal and external benchmarking comparisons.
Within this framework, the team also began examining firms’ compound annual growth rate (CAGR). A law firm’s billing rate CAGR shows a multi-year view of the firm’s rate increase history, accounting for past increases and rate freezes. Standardizing the figures this way enabled better side-by-side comparisons across the portfolio, and showed which law firms were high or low outliers based on their multi-year rate history.
The VWGoA team also found it very helpful to use data to model the dollar impact of the requested increases per timekeeper for the coming year. This was instrumental in identifying the most impactful requests in order to focus on managing costs.
Seeing the benefits
Through this new approach, VWGoA legal leadership and legal operations were able to implement more effective governance and decision logic to streamline the rate decisions in light of portfolio metrics and company financial considerations. By streamlining and consolidating the process, they freed up considerable hours that their staff had previously spent responding to rate increase requests as they came in, managing them all through one common workflow. They saved further time be setting auto-approval thresholds for certain rate increase increments.
In the end, the projected savings for the coming year were significant, with rate increases for various timekeepers, for example, trimmed to about one-half of the increment originally sought. The VWGoA team devoted particular attention to adjusting high outliers and managing the impact on budget in a sustainable way.
Beyond time and money savings, the team built a process that leveraged better data to drive better decisions. The result is a strong business case showing how those in legal can use technology and data more effectively to increase productivity and execute against business metrics.
From law firms’ perspective, understanding the data that informs a client’s financial position is a helpful way to focus their rate increase conversations onto a productive end for both sides.
“We recognize that, in this economy, many clients are facing challenging headwinds,” says Susan Vargas, Partner at King and Spalding. “As trusted partners, we are glad to talk about goals and metrics to strengthen our relationship in mutually beneficial ways — and we welcome informative data to help us do that.”
