Catherine Krow is the Founder of Digitory Legal, an award-winning data analytics and cost management platform that...
Daniel W. Linna Jr. has a joint appointment at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and McCormick School...
Published: | May 27, 2020 |
Podcast: | Law Technology Now |
Category: | Legal Technology , Practice Management |
Tune into this episode with Dan Linna and Catherine Krow as they discuss her company Digitory Legal, a cost analytics platform that brings data-driven pricing and cost prediction to law, and also explains why data is important for litigators to understand. Catherine breaks down how to predict costs, review data correctly, and acquire it for her practice. She also explains what law firms should do to provide the best quality value and services to their clients. She also discusses how data is being used to evaluate and improve diversity and inclusion efforts. She ends by letting our listeners know where she believes data will go in the legal industry and how those new developments will impact law firms and their clients.
Catherine Krow is the founder of Digitory Legal.
Special thanks to our sponsors, Headnote, Logikcull and Acumass.
Law Technology Now
Data-Driven Legal Services: Pricing and Cost Prediction, with Catherine Krow
05/27/2020
Dan Linna: Hello. This is Dan Linna. Welcome to Law Technology Now on the Legal Talk Network. My guest today is Catherine Krow. Catherine is the Founder and CEO of Digitory Legal, a cost prediction and management platform.
Digitory Legal uses Artificial Intelligence to transform and analyze billing data and create predictive pricing models for complex legal work. Before founding Digitory Legal, Catherine practiced law for 17 years, first at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett and then as a litigation Partner at Orrick.
Catherine, pleased to welcome you to the show.
Catherine Krow: Thank you Dan so much for having me here. It’s an absolute pleasure.
Dan Linna: Well, thanks, I really look forward to our conversation, but before we get started I want to thank our sponsors.
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All right, Catherine, why don’t we start with, you are the Founder and CEO of Digitory Legal, can you just tell us what Digitory Legal does?
Catherine Krow: I would be happy to. So Digitory is a cost analytics platform and service that’s really focused on bringing data-driven cost prediction and practice management to law, and we do it by leveraging data in practice management or e-billing software. A lot of which is pretty dirty or poorly structured and we transform it into actionable insight that our customers where both law firms and legal departments can use in a variety of ways. It helps them understand what very complex legal work should cost and why create accurate and well-scope budgets and alternative fee arrangements, project-manage, very, very effectively communicate that are around costs, and really generally excel at the business of law.
Dan Linna: So if we think about this from the perspective of a corporate legal department, I mean, what kind of problems are they trying to solve in a corporate legal department when they ask you to work with them?
Catherine Krow: Corporations right now are really looking for value and predictability, but without sacrificing quality of service and outcomes, and we use data to help them achieve that. The best way I can describe it from the client’s perspective if you will indulge me for a minute, is by using a construction analogy because when you think about it especially from the buyer’s perspective you are buying legal services particularly for complex work has a lot in common with a large construction project. If you don’t scope it right from the beginning and really measure and manage all the way through, you end up with a money pit.
And so, the cycle that we use data to break kind of goes like this. You are the buyer of legal services just like you would be if you were trying to create a house, you know your outcome, you know what you want, but you may not know exactly what it takes to get there, so you get a few recommendations, you get some high-level bids, they are versions of, it depends and you get going and something happens because something always happens.
So in your construction world maybe it’s bad weather or you wanted to add a garage and nobody told you how much that would cost, and at the end of the day you have got your beautiful house but you are mad because it costs too much and it took too long. And so really what we do is use data to break that cycle and to make that relationship better and so you start at the beginning. That quote shouldn’t be a high level, it depends. It should have the activities in it, it should be well-scoped, it should be based on data, data from similar situations. So bad weather — if you are going to have bad weather you can look at the bad weather costs.
Project-manage, when you add that garage, there should be a number around it and a quote before that becomes, it shouldn’t be a surprise and we use data to add accountability and cost transparency because which gets measured gets managed and so giving visibility into what the value is that you are getting using data. And so you end up with the same great results the outcome but it costs less.
(00:05:00)
There were no surprises and the relationship is stronger, and so that is the cycle from the client’s perspective that that’s the experience they want and we use data to give it to them.
Dan Linna: Well, so I would like to take a deeper dive into using data analytics more generally and we can first — we will first talk about predicting costs, I would like to also talk about draw and your experience as a litigator thinking how you might use data from a litigator’s perspective in thinking making predictions and matters. There’s a fair amount to talk about some of these topics but there aren’t a lot of opportunities where I feel like people kind of start getting into the nuts and bolts of how do we do this, but also that the why, right, and some of the other opportunities beyond just I think I think especially five or ten years ago when you heard this topic come up, maybe especially if you are the lawyer and the law firm you would be like this is the last thing I want to talk about, right, and this is not going to go anywhere that is good for me, all right.
But I would like to in this conversation talk about, well, how can we do it, but then what are some of the reasons why if you’re the lawyer even in the legal environment when your client says to you, we want to go down this path why you should say, yes, I want to go on this journey with you and there’s benefit in both of us being on this journey?
Catherine Krow: Well, as you know my background, it was a litigator for a long time and a lot of that passion behind why we do, what we do, came from that experience of particularly as a partner having to answer that how much question in really, really complicated situations of litigation that is 00:06:33 the company high-stake stuff and then live with the answer overtime.
So that is very, very difficult, but it is also absolutely mission-critical. I think once upon a time you got to say, it depends, but those days are over. And so, if you are not really understanding the business needs of your client you cannot truly be their trusted advisor. They need you to answer business questions for them because they ultimately answer to a business, and so where it came down for me was trying to be and facilitate lawyers being better trusted advisors and that relationship being better and using data to do.
One of the interesting learning experiences was when clients would go, why can’t my lawyers answer this question, aren’t they experts? That’s when you come across the data problem and it’s actually that’s the core of what we do is solve a data problem, but it is epic in law, and if you are not willing to go down that journey and think about data and better answers and business answers for your client, now you are just a lawyer and we need lawyers to be — if clients need their lawyers to be more than that.
Dan Linna: Yeah, well, I would like to talk through a little bit about what the steps are in the process and I think getting to that question I hear so much high-level discussion about, oh, we have lots of data, we have so much data in law. It’s like, well, but until you start working with it, you won’t find out if it’s the right data or what the quality of the data is and my concern is a lot of the data that we think we have we can do something with is not going to be all that valuable, but let’s walk through that process about thinking, like if you are — when you work with a corporate legal department, how do you start acquiring data, how does that process actually kind of move forward usually?
Catherine Krow: The point you just made, I sometimes call Data Debt. We as an industry have not been particularly rigorous about data management practices and that means we have a lot of it, but a lot of times it doesn’t tell you anything. And so that process of turning that big unstructured mess into actionable insight is a fairly significant process and sometimes it takes some change management. So let’s talk about how we engage with corporate legal departments.
The first thing to understand about what we do, I think this is important for anybody who is working with law firms and legal departments is be a partnership not just the platform, there’s no one-size-fits-all. So the first step is a conversation, a conversation about what the goals are, then understanding of the objectives because a legal department has many different stakeholders with different objectives, and it’s best when they are all aligned.
So legal procurement wants one thing, legal operations wants another thing, the in-house counsel wants something else, how do we align all of those objectives and use data to do it?
So that’s step one and just to give an example of what we have seen law departments do now. Right now they are looking for the right partners to be on this journey, this challenging journey with them and use data to understand who has been doing right by them from a business perspective.
(00:10:04)
So all the stakeholders coming together within legal departments to really review their panels and use data to make better decisions about who their partners should be going forward, so that’s sort of one scenario. So step one, understand their objectives.
Step two is the data analytics part. So we look at historical data and we run our algorithm on it coming from the e-billing system, and we do data assessments, what is great that your law firms are doing, where is change management needed, some of that is guideline violations, but we’re very, very good at getting blood from a stone. So we can generally create benchmarks and maps of what happened in the past based on that data.
So that gives them insight that they can use to have different conversations around costs with their law firms and when that garage is added they have an understanding of what that should cost them so they can make better decisions based on historical data. But once that data is actionable, and I’m going to define that in a minute. There are opportunities for improvement and so sometimes the conversation is, here’s what happened in the past, how do we move you from what matters did cost what they should cost?
So when data is actionable, and by that I mean, task level, well-labeled, so you can see value, you can see staffing, you can see efficiency, accurately and consistently coded so it tells you the truth and connected to context that why behind the numbers. Now you can really visualize where the areas are for process improvement and they partner with their law firms to move past what matters did cost to what they should cost.
And, we also work with them on creating predictive pricing models, at high levels, at very, very granular templates levels that are processed maps, because when you have solved the data problem, when you have actionable data, the number of questions you can answer is almost limitless. So the engagement varies depending on the needs of the customer, but data is at the heart of everything we do.
Dan Linna: Well, I like what you said about moving to the process improvement part of this, tell me like, why is that important and how does that add value?
Catherine Krow: Embedded in certain business models are challenges or under-delegation is one of the great examples. So lean principles suggest that you use the lowest cost resource capable of doing the work and helping clients see who is doing that, actually finding the ones who are or doing right by them, but also helping clients see, there are opportunities for you to have a conversation with your law firm about staffing and move forward in a more positive way and we can show that to them because it’s very, very clear in the data when the data is actual.
But the business models of the past, I’ve been in this industry for a long time and I won’t even acknowledge those dates for a very long time, starting from when you could write on for services rendered, $1 million, it just doesn’t work that way. The business models need to evolve and having visibility into where those opportunities are is really, really, really important, buried in a lot of those opaque impenetrable bills, a lot of opportunities to do better, be more profitable as from a law firm’s perspective but also deliver more value for less money.
Dan Linna: Well, I want to continue talking about delivering greater value and these questions about delegation of work and how that might relate to diversity inclusion things like that, but before we continue jumping into these questions in our interview with Catherine Krow, we’re going to take a quick break to hear a message from our sponsor.
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(00:15:10)
Dan Linna: And we’re back. Thank you for joining us. We’re with Catherine Krow, the Founder and CEO of Digitory Legal.
Catherine, we’re talking about using data analytics in pricing, and measuring value, one of the questions I have in this whole discussion, I’ve been doing a little bit of research lately about this lack of kind of standard definitions of quality and value that we have in the industry, and I mean — if that makes it, I mean, there are a lot of obstacles I think that presents, but the delegation question even if we don’t know the quality of work, right, if we don’t have good metrics for measuring quality, how do we make sure the work actually is getting to the right people and producing the greatest value. I mean, what do we need to do in that space still, and what kind of maybe creative things are you seeing law firms and their clients do to really come up with better measures of quality, and value, and service delivery?
Catherine Krow: We’re definitely seeing corporate legal departments standardize their metrics and weight them. So finding out from their side what is important and the metrics tend to fall into practice of law, so industry expertise, client-centricity, are they giving us the best quality of people and responding well, and also cost management. So you’ll see different metrics being used that they tend to fall into these buckets, but one of the biggest challenges I think is that law firms and legal departments aren’t communic on the same page about the importance of these different metrics. So I saw a survey recently which was fascinating to me where the core values around what is important to the buyer, the same nine or ten things falling into these three buckets were weighted and ranked by the buyers and by the sellers, and there’s a disconnect.
For example, law firms think prior relationship is a lot more important to the buyers of legal services than buyers do. Law firms think cost management is less important than it is. So I think that the metrics that there should be, there are publications out there, let’s talk about this is what we’re measuring on, these are the questions we’re asking and they’re starting to sound very similar and they do fall into these buckets. What is not being communicated is how important it is, where the waiting is for clients?
Clients don’t care if you’re doing CLEs. They are a lot less important than perhaps law firms realize. Clients care a lot more about cost management than they may be communicating to their law firms. So we have a lot to do as an industry on getting our buyers and sellers of legal services on the same page. Law firms are constantly going what do you want and clients are tired of hearing it, but clients need to be communicating what’s important to them and what they are scoring on in very, very clear ways.
And by the way that brings us back to diversity. I do believe and am seeing that clients care more about this than law firms realize, and this is an issue that they haven’t let go of and that is easy for law firms lose sight of in times of crisis. So I want to circle back to that because that’s a metric that is growing in importance on the client’s side.
Dan Linna: Well, tell us about that. I mean I think that one of the things that I saw when I was in practice is that this data could be really valuable as far as figuring out the right kind of teams to put together, also making sure that in the training of attorneys, making sure they are getting the right kind of experiences and real substantive experiences that they needed, right, not just some sort of check-the-box exercise, but then now what are you kind of then seeing I guess the way law firms are using the kind of data you can — excuse me, corporate legal departments are using kind of your data to really hold their law firms accountable to reach the goals they’ve said in this space.
Catherine Krow: Yeah, so one of the things that happens when you turn data into the truth you make it actionable and I think I need to discuss the data problem a little bit, so people — the listeners understand why this is so hard.
Dan Linna: Yeah, right, yes.
Catherine Krow: So the data problem is, I go back to the construction analogy. So we’re sitting on a lot of billing data, but it has been coated as at all at a very, very high level inconsistently and wrong. So if you think about it with the construction analogy, it’s like being able to see the cost of a house but having no idea how many bedrooms or bathrooms there are or square feet, or what city it’s in or if the basement was finished and then somebody coded all your plumbing as drywall.
(00:20:06)
So not only does it not tell you anything useful, if you try to use it, it will lie to you, it will tell you all the wrong things.
So what Digitory does is transform that into the truth and break it down and when we do create actual insight from that jumbled mess, you can see what lawyers are actually doing and that means you can assess work allocation.
One of the greatest challenges in advancing diverse attorneys is unfair allocation of work, less opportunity to get career advancing assignments and a disproportion that is doing the lion’s share of work that while valuable is not going to get you made equity partner.
And so when we do data analytics one of the things that we look at is all right, now that we have unpatched this jumbled mess and we are telling you who is doing what and you can trust the coding, what is happening? Are you seeing fairness or are you seeing senior women doing lower level work than their male counterparts and data can actually show you in black and white what is really going on, and when you see it you can fix it and it’s very, very, very important to be looking at not just qualitative anecdotal information, but truly looking at data, because when it’s there in black and white that’s when change can happen.
Dan Linna: And what do you think, are we seeing enough law firms then that are using this data to then be able to make better decisions? Because I mean I think there are a lot of initiatives underway where people at least say they are trying to do these things, now maybe we could say some of it’s just lip service and maybe people aren’t really committed to it. But part of the problem is even people who are really committed to this having the data to make good decisions is a huge obstacle.
Catherine Krow: Yeah. To really make change in law firms, and you have heard me say this before Dan, I think people, process and technology needs to work together and when they do work together the magic can happen.
So I do believe that law firms are committed to this. You can see this in the Move the Needle Fund, you can see this in the Power of Diversity Lab, the message that has been amplified and we are part of amplifying around what happened to diversity and inclusion in 2008 and just to put some data around that, wiped out in a blink of an eye, 20 years of work towards diversity inclusion was wiped out in that recession, and just one piece of data, 16% of the equity partners at that time were women. They represented 50% of the equity partner layoffs. So some very bad things happened.
That cannot happen again and I think there is a recognition from law firms represented by Move the Needle Fund and the contributions that are being made that that can’t happen anymore. You see more equitable approaches to handling the recession, but more can be done. And so if you combine people, process and technology we can actually really move the needle.
One example, you need people just talking about what we do with data. You need people to understand why it’s important to write down in their narrative what they are doing. It matters. There is only so much you can do if you wrote down attention to matter and that’s all anybody can see. So no one can help you if you don’t help yourself.
Process, somebody has to have defined what career advancing work is and what those proportions are, be monitoring this and go back and intervene.
And technology, data like ours that shows you what’s actually happening, not what people coded, what is truly happening, who is taking expert — this kind of expert deposition, who is arguing motions and who is writing checklists, that kind of black and white information, but it all has to work together, and when it does Dan, that’s when change — that’s when real change can happen.
Dan Linna: Well, just to go back to when you are talking about the data problem part of this then too, so part of the problem is, is not coding things properly, surprise-surprise, like people tend to err on calling it analysis or something more sophisticated than what it is maybe sometimes and so that’s a problem, but then also even — so you are figuring out how to use narratives to figure out what actually happened?
Catherine Krow: Yeah.
Dan Linna: And then that puts some pressure though too on writing better narratives and actually training attorneys to understand why writing those narratives is important and in their long-term self-interest as well, right, because this can contribute to a virtuous cycle where we better understand the work, maybe we can even get away from billable hour to figure out a fixed fee arrangement where gee, the revenue goes down but profitability can go up.
(00:25:04)
I mean is this — now, is this just pie in the sky or do you — can you point to something that yes, we can start showing more people that okay, if the law firms do the right thing, we would get a better handle on the work, that it can be win-win outcomes?
Catherine Krow: It absolutely can be win-win. So I think because of the way — lawyers will never code things right and we automate that for them, because frankly figuring out what code set and now clients are creating their own code sets, it’s just incredibly time-consuming and burdensome and they are not data scientists. So a lot of what we do is automate that miserable process, so that you have consistency and accuracy in the coding.
Another part of what we do is change management, and this is one of the greatest things I have seen. You hear a lot about how lawyers won’t change, I don’t think that’s true. I think if you make it clear why they should change, they do and we have seen amazing, amazing change in behavior, because somebody took the time to explain how this is going to increase the realization, keep them out of bill review and make sure that they are scoping better, make their lives better. So change management is part of it.
We can do amazing things with technology, but investing in the process and the people and explaining, that’s there too. And when you have really great data and you have the ability to understand what things should cost and to see what they should cost, you can get to activity-based alternative fee arrangements which I think are state-of-the-art and really fair.
I could always live with maybe I miscalculated how much a deposition would cost, what I couldn’t live with was thinking there would be five and it turned out there were 55, that’s the challenge. So, material change orders, transparency, process improvement, all of these things — data on top of that to facilitate all of that, it all works together so that we have a happier client and a more profitable engagement.
Dan Linna: Yeah. Well, I love the idea that lawyers may be more open to change than we think. I mean we know that it’s tough to crack into this, including if a firm is very profitable for example.
On the other hand, I think we talk a lot in this innovation space about empathy, but yeah, we are really quick to call the lawyers Luddites who won’t — millionaires who won’t change, it’s like well, wait a second, I thought we are supposed to have empathy.
So I mean of course — like so understanding what do they really care about, what are their pain points, how do we actually have that connection with them.
So I would like to dive into that and then also talk a little bit about we see law firms and legal departments hiring data scientists and think about where is this going in the future, what kind of skills the lawyers need to have, but before we continue our interview with Catherine Krow, we are going to take just another quick break to hear a message from our sponsor.
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Dan Linna: And we are back. Thank you for joining us. We are with Catherine Krow, the Founder and CEO of Digitory Legal.
Catherine, we have been talking about using data analytics in the pricing phase and to get a better handle on the work to be done, one of the things I am really interested, I think we have got a lot of different things that are siloed in the legal space and there are some people who are looking at kind of like making predictions in substantive legal matters, predicting the success of motions, things like that.
What you are doing I think will be really interesting information that could help determine who is the right person to do the work, you could start getting insights on how do you put together teams to be more successful, of course those are all things that have impact on outcomes as well, right? So I think one of the many things that’s exciting in this space is to start thinking about how can all these things start fitting together better and we can start using data really kind of across the board to get better outcomes for the client. I mean where do you kind of see things going?
Catherine Krow: I do see all of these pieces fitting together. In fact, we have a customer that combines what we do with another legal analytics product to combine pricing with cycle times and do we want this motion for summary judgment because this particular judge has X% and so they are advising clients combining outcome analytics with pricing analytics and so all of these things do fit together.
(00:29:53)
We are seeing a number of law firms hiring data scientists and some interesting things going on also in the business development space, if you have great datasets about what leads have worked, like what has worked and what hasn’t. I have just heard a presentation by a data scientist at a large firm who did incredible work automating some of the business development processes.
So the key to data scientists being successful as well is the quality of the data. So one of the things that we do is give back enriched, well-labeled, accurately coded task level data with attributes around the matter so data scientists can be empowered to be as successful as possible in putting all of the pieces together, the practice of law, the business of law, outcome prediction.
I see great things happening, but I do think that we as an industry and lawyers in particular need to take that moment to understand why this is important and why they should be thinking about the exhaust that they are putting off, the data that they are putting off.
Dan Linna: Well, thinking about this and sometimes I hear people say well, I am a lawyer, I am not going to be the data scientist, I can just hire someone to do that for me and I worry that that’s not an approach that’s going to work; in fact, my bet is that we need to train lawyers to understand these things, not to be the data scientists, but to understand how data can be used, to ask the right questions, to work as part of a team with other professionals.
And so my bet would be on training law students in quantitative analysis so they can work with data scientists I mean in the fanciest of firms, down to — I shouldn’t say down to, but like in the fanciest of firms, corporate legal departments, legal aid organizations, right, we need to use data in all these places and if the lawyers don’t have an understanding of data, they won’t get quality results from using the data and as a matter of fact, then we also have to worry about engraining biases and things like that if they don’t actually understand the processes.
Anyway, I am leading you maybe too much here, but just tell me, what do you think, I mean will we be doing more of this in law schools and do we need to be training lawyers more about data, how to use data responsibly and effectively?
Catherine Krow: I think this comes back to we need to be training lawyers to be more than just lawyers. I think that the market requires more skills than just the ability to craft an argument and this is all part of it.
So understanding why it is important that work is tracked, that data is created in a clean way, how that is being used, respecting the allied business professionals and understanding all of the ways they are going to help you succeed in your career, all of this starts at law school and should continue throughout, whether you call it Delta model, T-shaped lawyers, it’s important that we start changing the way that we train lawyers to think so that they are going to be successful going forward in a market that demands legal service delivery, not just legal practice, but a full range of skills and data is one of them. If you don’t understand how it’s going to be used, that’s going to be a disadvantage to you.
Dan Linna: That is great to hear and I think there are some great opportunities and I would agree completely that it kind of falls across the board. One of the questions I wanted to ask that’s kind of related to the times we find ourselves in right now, the COVID-19 times, is that I think a lot of people are saying oh, we are never going to go back, things are irrevocably changed. I worry a little bit that we don’t have enough people in the legal industry who really kind of have a vision for the future and what things could look like for it, where we should be aiming, where we should be trying to go, and I think people maybe underestimate the ability of lawyers to like when this crisis is over that we could just go back — could go back to the way things were in the past.
So I guess kind of in this space, I mean I don’t know what you would kind of think about — how might you — what might you say like we should be aiming for, like how should we be thinking about the ways we use data and these relationships between the customers and the lawyers and what our North Star ought to be I guess guiding us and thinking about how to do all these things?
Catherine Krow: It’s really all about being the best partner you can be to your client and understanding that your client has greater needs than you may be seeing just as a practicing lawyer working on a matter. And so if you take a macro view to the needs of your client right now, you are going to be able to position yourself better.
So if I want to bring this back to the crisis that we are facing at the moment, I personally believe and there is some survey data to support this that there will be a tsunami of litigation that will follow onto this. And there is no law firm in the world who is going to be able to say at the beginning of that, hey, I have done 104 COVID cases, because it’s all new, it’s also going to be very exciting work.
(00:35:09)
You need to be positioning yourself as the law firm and as the lawyer as the partner that they select. And to do that means thinking through, putting yourself in the shoes of that client, what do they need. They need to know that you are looking at data and processes, that you are doing right for them by a business — from a business perspective, that you are not going to dump your diverse lawyers, you are still maintaining the track that they articulated and are continuing to articulate is important to them.
You are coming to them proactively to say this is what we see for you and how it is going to affect your business. You are thinking about what challenges they are facing financially and getting creative about risk sharing and alternative fee arrangements. All of these things to position yourself, to differentiate yourself, to be the right partner as your clients navigate what is going to be some of the toughest years they have ever faced, they need the right partners to do that and those partners have thought about the macro view and that includes data.
Dan Linna: Well, kind of in that framing, we are coming to the close of our time so I think we probably have time for one more question and so I will ask you this, just kind of like thinking when I was still practicing there was a lot of talk about the general counsels now would become kind of like the general contractor, to use the analogy you were using before and that they would figure out well, when do I use which law firm, when might I use an alternative legal services provider, when might I use the big four or a legal tech company. I guess, and maybe my bias having practiced before that, I kind of always thought well, why wouldn’t it be the lawyer and the law firm that is actually best positioned to be able to do that.
Now, if you really have this trusted relationship with the client that you really kind of know the landscape, you know how to get the work to the right person inside the law firm, when to go to people outside of law firm and things like that. And I mean to what extent does the data that you are gathering help answer that question? I mean do you have data that might suggest the way the marketplace is playing out and which party is actually best positioned to kind of be the general contractor kind of of the legal matter?
Catherine Krow: This goes back to the process improvement and where the opportunities are to reduce cost without sacrificing quality, and that piece, without sacrificing quality does matter, outcomes matter, but one of the things that you can see with data is where there is an opportunity for an alternative legal service provider and a true trusted partner, really a true trusted partner is a law firm that is looking for those opportunities and will outsource or get creative with insourcing to maximize those efficiencies without ever compromising quality.
And so forming their own relationships with alternative legal service providers and negotiating deals with them so that they are outsourcing rather than throwing overly expensive first and second year associates at it, or if they are for the training opportunity absorbing enough of the cost so that that makes sense from a financial perspective.
But it all comes down Dan to trust and that relationship and building that trust and using data to show that you are delivering value and where you are as a trusted partner, not always taking the cheap buck, but doing what’s right for your client in the long run and data can help you prove that and it can help you facilitate that.
Dan Linna: Catherine, this has been a great conversation. I think next time I have to invite you back for like a four hour fireside chat and then maybe we can actually cover all the things I want to cover, but thank you so much for joining us.
And before we wrap up, can you just tell our listeners how they can follow your work; I know you are on Twitter and what other ways might they be able to see what you are doing and contact you?
Catherine Krow: I am on Twitter @DigitoryLegal or @cmkrow. You can follow me there. You can always check out our blog on our website and we have a Pricing Matters Podcast where we interview industry thought leaders on pricing and project management and we recently had Diversity Lab on. So you can find that on our website at digitorylegal.com and your listeners are always welcome to email me at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you and staying in touch.
Dan Linna: Thank you again Catherine.
Catherine Krow: My pleasure Dan, always great to talk to you.
Dan Linna: This has been another edition of Law Technology Now on the Legal Talk Network. Please take a minute to subscribe and rate us in Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.
You can find me on Twitter @DanLinna, please follow me, re-tweet links of this episode and join the legal innovation and technology discussion online.
And join us next time for another edition of Law Technology Now. I am Dan Linna, signing off.
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Law Technology Now features key players, in the legal technology community, discussing the top trends and developments in the legal technology world.