Senior Manager of Pricing and Legal Project Management

Senior Manager, Pricing and Legal Project Management

We are a Firm where people truly believe in what they do and strive to achieve the highest standards of performance and success.

This position can be based in our global operations center in Tampa, FL, or at one of the Firm's offices:
Atlanta, Austin, Birmingham, Boston, Charlotte, Chattanooga, Chicago, Dallas, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Jacksonville, Miami, Nashville, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Richmond, Stamford, Tallahassee, Tysons, Washington, D.C., or West Palm Beach.

General Description:

This position will report to the Director of Pricing and Legal Project Management (LPM) but also will have a high degree of interaction with the Section Leaders, practice group leaders and other partners, as well as the business services areas such as Marketing, Finance and Business Development.

The Senior Manager will play a crucial role in triaging the pricing and LPM requests that will help the firm grow client relationships, maximize market share, and ensure long-term competitiveness while meeting profitability and reporting objectives.

Key Responsibilities and

Essential Job Functions:

• Pricing | Analytics
• Work with the Director of Pricing & LPM to develop best practices for the evaluation and negotiation of alternative fee arrangements (AFAs), annual fee increases, and value-based billing arrangements.
• Generate suggested AFAs for proposed engagements while modelling the related financial metrics to project and target desired profitability results.
• Generate and promote AFA options for client proposals.
• Analyses impact of client rate arrangements including financial modelling and impact analysis of alternative rate scenarios on the firm and client.
• Develop modelling for "what if" scenarios to be used in pricing matters, including staffing and leverage variables.
• Support the attorneys, practice groups, and other business professionals to draft the financial and pricing responses to client RFP submissions.
• Ensure that billing rates are set to maximize profitability with appropriate consideration of DE&I, practice mix, and market realities as well as compensation and other costs.
• Shepherd the approval process for pricing requests, provide decision support analysis and advising firm leadership on pricing arrangements.
• Ensure all significant pricing and fee arrangements, including client wide agreements and AFAs requests are stored in a central repository.
• Develop procedures for capturing, centralizing, and making the relevant information available to partners.
• Improve AFA tracking, monitoring, analysis, and management.
• Implement robust benchmarking and analytical tools and capabilities.
• Develop and implement tools and processes for efficiently mining on our past engagements and predictive modelling.

Legal Project Management

• Develop high level project/matter planning and phase / task level techniques to help scope, price and staff matters.
• Monitor and anticipate budget overruns, alert partners, and suggest recommended solutions; develop budget tracking tool; maintain and update budget database; make recommendations about alternative ways to manage matters effectively within budget constraints.
• Develop and incorporate project reporting to monitor performance of project/matters against budget.
• Partner with IT to develop innovative approaches that help improve the efficiency and profitability of project/matters.
• Advise responsible partners on staffing strategies for matter specific work.
• Identify matters that are not AFA-based but need budget preparation and/or updating based on client Outside Counsel Guidelines ("OCG"); provide notification of deadlines to partners and update budgets to meet client requirements; in collaboration with the firm's contracts team, update OCG budget database with new/updated OCG requirements.
• Work with departments and practice group management to develop and implement staffing and budget templates that can be used as the basis for efficient development and evaluation of AFAs for recurring projects. Evaluate the reliability of these templates on a regular basis.

• Support efforts with regular evaluation and management of the firms preferred provider…