Toby Brown of Perkins Coie on the value of Intapp

Transcript

I’m Toby Brown. I’m the Chief Practice Management Officer for Perkins Coie.

When I got into pricing I was blown away. The reaction of lawyers saying, “Wow,” you know, “I don’t want to do this and the fact that you can do it for me is spectacular.” Words I repeat all the time. Immediate, transparent, actionable.

Having that kind of information available to partners, frankly to associates and in an immediate way can modify, impact their behavior in positive ways. So tools like Intapp’s Pricing for budgeting and monitoring that makes it very transparent, that makes it real time, it makes it actionable. So, those metrics are going to become more and more important.

Lawyers are going to understand them more and more over time. Pricing people are really on the forefront of teaching them about that. So, it’s evolving to the point where the pricing teams are becoming trusted advisers and not just, you know, functionaries. Right now most firms, us included, it’s a spreadsheet, because there’s no tool to capture all of those pricing proposals.
And realize, we don’t win all of them. But just because we didn’t win it doesn’t mean it’s not a valuable knowledge point because we can say, “Hey, wait a minute we pitched that kind of deal before, we didn’t win it, here’s how we pitched it, or here’s how we priced it, you know, is that still a good idea or do we want to change it?” But the ability to re-purpose those and easily get to those, understand them, that’ll have tremendous value, a lot of value.

And so yes, Intapp is a good partner. They listen, they adapt… the pricing tool’s one example. Upfront I gave a lot of input, and happy to do it and say, “Here’s my thoughts on this. Here’s the sort of functionality I think will be of most importance.” And absolutely Intapp listen and product reflects that.

But with Intapp’s tools we can go on offense, and by going on offense I mean instead of waiting for somebody to ask us to do something, we can go forward and propose it. And it will lead to more profitable work. And for the client it always has to be win-win. So now we’ve got a win for the client, and we have a defined win for us.