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LPM, pricing and related functions in law firms – a thought experiment

Graeme Johnston / 4 December 2025

Originally published on LinkedIn 


Many large and even medium law firms have created specialist roles in legal project management, pricing, process improvement and data. I’ve been thinking about how I would ideally organise this topic if leading such a firm, assuming that it does mainly complex, not-easily-predictable, fairly large scale commercial work.


I’ve taken into account many conversations over the years with people in all sorts of different roles in law firms and their corporate clients, and relied upon my observations of what works or doesn’t work, while also bringing to bear my thoughts about what can realistically work and taking into account various readings.

It’s a thought-experiment and as such may not make sense for the specific situation of a particular firm, but I hope it may nevertheless serve to provoke thought even where you disagree with it.

1. Defining the mission

LPM and pricing roles in law firms share, or ought to share, the same basic underlying purpose: helping the firm deliver in ways which better meet the needs of clients and which are also aligned with the firm’s own needs.


When I informally interviewed a number of LPM specialists a couple of years ago, as summarised here, there was some difference in emphasis between financial and non-financial needs but I see this as a matter of degree rather than a fundamental difference. It is possible to have an approach which addresses client needs related to project delivery (e.g. timeliness), fees (e.g. predictable pricing at a reasonable level) and other costs (e.g. time drain for individual client representatives) together with less tangible but still important needs such as reassurance. It’s also possible to do this while helping with the firm’s profitability needs and delivering a better working experience for its people. These are topics to seek balance on, with the approach reflecting the particular organisation’s ethos. That said, client service delivery at effective prices should be the most important thing.


Whatever the theory, the reality tends to emerge from what these roles actually touch on and prioritise. This includes planning and scoping of matters, their financials (pricing, profitability), resourcing them, reporting them and handling in-matter changes effectively. It includes learning how to get better at forecasts and assumptions, and improving how all the things just listed are done.

2. Where to draw the line between units

As today’s business clients increasingly emphasise predictability, budgeting and transparency on progress against plan and budget, and as the financial and non-financial aspects of this are not really separable, a joined-up pricing/LPM function would be my starting point. The function will also need some capability of its own to help generate better data and put it to use.


Such a function also needs to have close working relationships with, in particular:

  • The client-facing lawyers
  • Legal knowledge / PSLs
  • Financial / practice management (typically with a strong focus on rate setting and WIP-to-cash)
  • Flexible resourcing and alternative delivery
  • IT / innovation / legal tech / AI (whether unified or split)


I don’t want this to be a piece mainly about structure but will come back at the end to the question of whether to combine the LPM/pricing unit with some of these functions.

3. Skills and backgrounds within the unit

Clearly a range of skills are required. But I think a diversity of individual backgrounds is also desirable within the LPM/pricing unit.


People with a background in lawyering can contribute insights from that (at the risk of over-generalising from their own specific niche) and those from accounting / finance / tech / data or outside-of-law project management backgrounds can do likewise.


I’ve occasionally heard strong statements along the lines that LPM people must have been lawyers or must have not have been lawyers: either is too dogmatic, I would say. I would go further and say that a mix is positively good. These are challenging roles and it helps to recognise deep down how legal work and lawyers are in some ways special and in other ways not. Having people from different backgrounds helps with that.

4. What this team should not be doing

LPM and pricing roles can only ever be a small proportion in headcount to the client-facing lawyers, so a really big issue is how to minimise distraction and maximise positive impact.


Let’s start with the distraction point.


Many teams in these areas are still dragged into day-to-day administrative tasks that  should be handled by lawyers, paralegals or PAs supported by effective investment in software and data coupled with clear responsibilities.


Things like:

  • Cleaning up bills and reviewing narratives for OCG compliance
  • Updating tracker spreadsheets
  • Producing custom reports
  • Logistical arrangements
  • Every little tweak to the plan


These activities shouldn’t take up a significant part of the team’s time. Instead, the team should define standard approaches, embed them into the firm’s tooling, and equip lawyers to execute these activities directly.


Inevitably, unusual or very large matters, or problem cases, will require temporary manual effort or unique reporting. In life, we all from time to time have to do a bit of what David Graeber (in Bullshit Jobs) called duct-taping. But these episodes should be treated as opportunities to refine processes, improve standards and automate. To learn and improve, in short.


The reason I emphasise this is that it is very easy for the LPM role to slip into a sort of an administrative assistant to the lawyers. It’s tempting because the things have to be done and it pleases the lawyers to have someone to do them, removing a distraction from the lawyers’ plate. But there are two dangers of allowing this to be a major part of the LPM role: it prevents the relevant administrative issues from being resolved more effectively, and it distracts from the more valuable contributions which should be the LPM focus.


Pragmatically, there are familiar workarounds here such as directing unavoidable duct-taping towards junior LPMers, justified partly on the basis that it helps to learn the job, get to know people and identify problems to be fixed. But this only makes sense up to a rather limited point. It needs to be challenged when it goes beyond that point.

6. What this team should clearly lead on

At the other end of the spectrum, the function should lead on strategic non-matter-specific work which it has a unique perspective to develop, notably:

  • Setting policies and standard operating procedures
  • Defining the data the firm needs and how to gather and use it effectively
  • Providing materials for use in actual matters: policies, procedures, process-focused templates, curated examples
  • Translating such materials into practice, for example by producing well-designed introductory materials, interactive training and (crucially) coaching in actual matters

7. Tech responsibilities

A crucial responsibility which can be somewhat sensitive is to select, implement and manage software tools which can help with needs in the above areas.

The most important example is tools which help the lawyers, not just the LPM/pricing/data specialists, to handle the planning, project management and pricing aspects of matters more effectively and thereby to generate better data.


But in setting up such a function today I would also be exploring the use of the latest tech to help lawyers to learn, for example by role-playing and exploring specific problems in a safe environment.


The reason I say this can be sensitive is that some people may feel uncomfortable about incorporating knowledge in tools which everyone can use. Looked at through a certain lens, it can be seen as risking a reduction of one’s usefulness. This is something to work through, ensuring that the team can find a genuine way to increase their usefulness by scaling the ability to make the knowledge practically applicable in a far wider range of work than is feasible with the comfortable zone of providing custom input into matters supported by specialist tools not used by the actual lawyers.

8. Involvement in matters: early is better

Another sensitive area is defining the appropriate degree of involvement in specific matters. I’m assuming we’re not talking about duct-taping here.

For matters with a very large financial value, some tactical coordination and custom reporting may genuinely add value, as the communication overhead is bigger (more people involved) and the downside of not addressing it effectively is greater (because of the amounts at stake). It can realistically be charged to clients because the value ought to be apparent.


But this sort of hands-on support isn’t viable in less huge matters. My suggestion would be that a strategic involvement in a selection of such matters is desirable, but no more.


By ‘strategic’ I mean this.

  • First, there should be an emphasis on the LPM / pricing team’s availability to give advice on how to set things up appropriately at the outset of matters. The team will need to ensure that their value proposition to the lawyers is clear and that they are easy to work with, meeting the lawyers largely where they are but with the firm’s leadership also emphasising to the lawyers that they must engage. The insistence should be particularly strong with parts of the firm which have financial or other performance issues.
  • Secondly, involvement of the LPM/pricing team should be about coaching and transfer of knowledge and skills, with appropriate easy-to-use tools increasingly supporting the lawyers to self-serve as they become more knowledgeable and confident. Done successfully, the LPM / pricing team’s personal involvement in such non-huge matters can reduce to occasional consultancy on unusual points arising.


The priority, in short, is to equip lawyers with the knowledge, habits, tools, templates and data to do more for themselves, not to do it for them.


As the firm’s maturity in this area increases, the LPM/pricing team’s roles become much more about increasing the effectiveness of tools, templates and data in matters and encouraging a virtuous circle which improves all of these.


To be clear, the LPM/pricing team can still become involved at strategic points after an ordinary non-huge matter is under way, for example where the scope of a matter has significantly changed in an unforeseeable way, or where things aren’t working out well and there needs to be some strategic assessment of how to fix process, tools, behaviours or whatever the problems are. But the emphasis again should be on advising and empowering the legal team and making systemic improvements.

9. Process improvement

In a firm doing large complex work with major elements of unpredictability, my view is that ‘legal process improvement’ shouldn’t be treated as a separate function. It belongs squarely within the combined LPM/pricing function. The label ‘LPM’ may obscure this, because much of the value shouldn’t come from managing specific projects, it should be more about improving how the firm delivers legal work at scale.


Firms doing genuinely complex work rarely need full-time process engineers except in so far as they also carry out highly repeatable, high-volume legal work which requires continuous updating of defined process flows in software.

10. Problems to anticipate

This is a short article so I won’t go into the details of the more tactical problems. But three big examples of unhappiness I’ve seen in this area and would focus on are:

  • Lawyers won’t engage early enough. A classic example is the unhappy LPM team called in to advise for the first time on a matter when things have already gone south.
  • Management are unhappy about lack of impact. If a team in this area gets a reputation for just running workshops or doing other things without evidence of positive business impact, sooner or later this is likely to lead to downsizing. I have spoken in some depth with people in this situation, from different perspectives, and it is painful for everyone. A typical defensive measure is to ensure that a few hours a day are charged out to clients so that the team’s costs and a bit more are covered. In my ideal set-up, with understanding leadership (i.e. hypothetically, me and colleagues) there might well be a bit of this for large matters where some manual tasks are genuinely valuable, but more emphasis would be placed on the highly scalable aspects and continuous improvement.
  • LPM / pricing team unhappy that lawyers / management don’t get it. This is the mirror of the problems above and requires an honest and ongoing discussion about what the real needs, objections, misunderstandings and other issues area. A bit like a lawyer-client relationship, and indeed all sorts of relationships, it needs empathy and ongoing effort.

11. The relationship with other functions

Let’s come back to a topic mentioned early in this article: the relationship with other parts of the firm. Should LPM/pricing be merged with any of them into a single unit?


Taking each in turn:

  1. The practising lawyers. I would strongly avoid merging LPM/pricing into the practice groups in the sense of having them report directly into practice group heads and being on their budgets. It risks a drift towards duct-taping and an undue emphasis on billable hours, undermining what should be the real value.
  2. Practice management functions. Although there is an important coordination requirement between LPM/pricing and practice management functions I would tend to keep these separated, with the former being centralised and more strategic in their matter involvement, and the latter being more focused on practice concerns (staffing etc) and the tactical details of financial hygiene. Activities which properly belong at practice level, reporting into practice group heads.
  3. Knowledge / PSL functions are significantly older than LPM / pricing / data functions in most large law firms. The sustainability of the distinction between the two groups is worth thinking about, as important changes in law often have implications for process, pricing, tools and data, even when they appear to be matters of ‘substantive law.’ And, at the very least, substantive law issues should be brought into process flows so that lawyers see them at the right moment. It’s all know-how, and process blurs into substance. Merger of knowledge with LPM / pricing / data would be challenging in many existing firms as the backgrounds, cultures and missions have been quite different historically. But in my ideal thought-experiment firm I would want at least to explore how to align them very closely and would seriously explore the possibility of a combined unit working in a cross-functional way around a shared mission.
  4. Centralised legal tech / innovation functions separated out from the IT department are often of a similar age, or newer, than LPM / pricing functions. My impression is that they have mostly struggled to deliver really meaningful change in law firms, with innovation team members quite often becoming frustrated and moving between firms within a few years, and with clients and management eventually questioning the value. While such teams can no doubt expose a firm to new ideas and possibilities, I think the best long-term recipe for grounded, successful change is likely to be to embed the relevant tech-related skills within LPM / pricing and other functions with ongoing client service delivery responsibilites (a specialised unit within a law firm handling more predictable, less complex work is another example). In the long run this will be better for everyone than an innovation team which is a little too far from the coalface to be realistically effective.


All that said, points 3 and 4 are likely to be politically sensitive and can be addressed in stages when the time is right internally. Successfully addressing the issues covered earlier in this article should be the ‘start now’ priority. As one experienced person in a law firm put it, after sharing views on organisational structure, ‘Structure matters – but vision, culture and clarity matter more.’


Whatever is done on these organisational issues, I would focus on avoiding ambiguity and overlap between these functions. This can be a source of paralysis or worse.

12. A rose, by any other name?

Throughout this article I’ve used terms such as LPM / pricing / data because they’re fairly well-established and I don’t really want to dwell on naming issues. It’s obviously not a great name for a function. Given the mission, a suitable name with words such as operations or delivery in it could be a good choice though there’s some delicacy in its implications for what’s inside and outside its remit. See the comment above about avoiding ambiguity and overlap.

13. The relationship with in-house legal operations

In-house legal functions face similar challenges but typically with fewer resources than large law firms. In-house legal operations roles often seem to become consumed by software implementation and administrative support, i.e. a combination of the legal tech / innovation and duct-taping activities mentioned above. Those holding such roles often seem rather separated from the lawyers, even more so than in law firms, despite the aspirations which can be seen on websites and articles in this area.


I don’t propose to say more about that topic in this article, given its law firm focus, but I do think there is interesting scope for in-house legal operations and legal department leadership to work together to nudge law firms in the sorts of directions mentioned above. That would be a good way of scaling up the impact of in-house legal ops, being realistic about the continuing resource challenge.


I suspect it’s also fair to say that in-house roles of all sorts, including legal ops, hold more power than they often seem to realise when it comes to addressing this sort of issue. To quote one experienced person on the law firm side: ‘Most firms will bend over backwards to help clients, if the ask is clear and direct: I’m always surprised by how tentative or vague some clients are in asking for support in this area.’

14. Further thoughts

As stated at the outset, this is very much an ideal, a thought-experiment, free of existing organisational constraints. I’m very open to other ideas. In that spirit, I’m curious – does what I’ve said make sense? What bits don’t? What would you do, given a blank sheet? What topics are missing, which ones would benefit from more detailed exploration?