Workers across industries may be united in a common dread of meetings, but that's not necessarily the case for the growing class of business professionals within law firms, at least when it comes to sit-downs with their firms' clients. These interactions mark a fundamental—and welcome—change in their status.

Take Melissa Prince, the chief client value and innovation officer at Ballard Spahr. She now finds herself meeting with the firm's clients two or three times a week, and she doesn't have to throw any elbows to get there.

"Our partners are coming to a place where they believe that having me involved with clients is better than them having the conversation with clients on a lot of very difficult topics," she says.

Those topics include pricing, project management and technology—all areas where large law firms are scrambling to get an edge. And Prince isn't alone. The client meeting was once solely the domain of lawyers, but more firms are coming to recognize the value of bringing into the room all the business professionals with fancy titles who they've recently hired.

Law firms aren't getting to that realization in a vacuum, however. While they have been building out professional positions for years and client pressure for improved efficiency during the Great Recession provided a jolt to the expansion of such roles, clients are increasingly aware of the power they hold.

"Clients have the power to drive how much the nonlawyer section of the law firm is going to be involved," says Justin Ergler, the director of alternative fee intelligence and analytics at GlaxoSmithKline. "As a default, we want your business lead and your diversity and inclusion lead in the room."

Through the rise of the discipline called legal operations, general counsel are delegating responsibilities to team members focused on identifying savings, negotiating fee agreements, and parceling out projects to an increasing array of vendors—not just traditional law firms, but alternative service providers and tech operations. When it comes to negotiating with law firms, these legal ops professionals want to sit down with people who can communicate in their language. Prince calls it a "game changer."

"There are a lot more legal operations people that are now working in law departments, and they feel more comfortable speaking with someone like me than with our partners sometimes," she says.

Dustin Laws, managing director in Major, Lindsey & Africa's law firm management practice, observes the same dynamic.

"When they come to the table, that client may bring their procurement person," Laws says. "They oftentimes want to see on the other side of the table, sitting in with the partners, someone on the business side who speaks the same vernacular."

For Reese Arrowsmith, who leads legal operations for Campbell's Soup, the business professionals' presence adds a different perspective than that of a relationship partner focused on the immediate fulfillment of a client's legal needs.

"They can make sure the firm is delivering services with the same strategy and methods that the in-house operations person has for the company," Arrowsmith says.

The business professionals' presence immediately improves communication between the two parties, and the benefits extend well beyond that, he says.

"For any corporation, the goal is for their law firm to deliver better results at the best possible price. Having individuals focused on innovating and experimenting and learning from their mistakes and applying them to lessons in the future can only lead to better delivery of legal services for the industry as a whole," Arrowsmith adds.

Goodwin Procter has been adept at adjusting to these new expectations. When Mike Caplan came aboard in August 2014 as its newest chief operations officer, he replaced the retiring Arthur Greenberg, a "traditional Big Law COO" who'd been in the position for two decades, he says.

Since Caplan was hired, Goodwin has dramatically increased the size of its operations staff, hiring for familiar roles like chief marketing officer, chief information officer and chief financial officer, as well as new ones like managing director of the program management office and managing director of international operations.

Caplan emphasizes that these individuals all understand what the firm is selling. Many are working directly with clients as part of the pitch process, and they can offer clients assistance on their own operations. But they know their limits, and that's key to the partnership getting on board.

"We are not a consulting business. We are not trying to create an operational consulting business. We're trying to create an operations consulting relationship," Caplan says. "The business is still the practice of law, and the lawyers own it."

There's never been a hard-and-fast rule that professionals and clients did not mix. Individuals in marketing positions, which were among the first business professional roles to emerge, have been collecting information for years on how they can serve a growing number of needs, as well as gathering data on the back end about client satisfaction.

But recent years have seen major growth in client-facing roles. Some of the shift has come from an emerging guild developing among these individuals. The Legal Marketing Association has provided a forum for business development professionals in law firms since 1985. Since 2012, pricing, process and project management professionals have been getting together under the LMA's wider umbrella through its annual P3 conference. Members of the community have had a yearly opportunity both to commiserate over their marginalization within law firms and to strategize about how they can draw more visibility to their contributions and drive more value to their firms.

That dynamic has developed alongside the explosion of legal operations on the client side, pushing open the door, at least at certain firms, for partners to draft in additional help.

"We force the issue," Ergler says. "We push firms, not just in terms of the smoke and mirrors savings, to justify their fee proposals: 'How do you get to this number?' If they say, 'Lawyers don't go to law school to do math,' we say, 'Well, then let's get the person who does math in the room.'"

At Campbell's, Arrowsmith finds he doesn't need to make any demands, as firms are increasingly recognizing the need to differentiate themselves.

"It's just by asking the question, 'Do you have a pricing person? Do you have operations professionals that I can and should communicate with?'" Arrowsmith says. "That would naturally force the firm to act."

When Suzanne Hawkins, the global director of client value at Reed Smith, arrived from GE Capital in 2017, she found that an environment that favored cross-selling within law firms worked to her advantage. As a former practicing attorney who had also worked as a consultant guiding corporate law departments, she was in high demand.

"Thanks to the fact that I'd been with a client and consulted for clients, especially as these legal operations roles expanded, there was more interest in bringing me in to meet with clients," she says.

For partners who aren't feeling immediate pressure from clients, there's an internal effort to educate them to the benefits of working with the project management, pricing and other specialists on her team, or to experiment with some of the technological tools they've built.

"Once they work with us, they see the value, and clients are actually asking us to work with them," Hawkins says.

When Matt Beekhuizen started in financial operations at Greenberg Traurig, the firm didn't have a pricing role. But after the Great Recession, client demands for discounts, blended rates, fixed fees and auctions escalated, prompting it to formalize the function. He became the firm's first chief pricing officer in 2014. Now, as much as half of his time is spent facing clients, a share that has grown in recent years as he travels to meetings and participates in pitches and proposals.

"When this all first developed, they were a little hesitant," he says about some of the firm's attorneys. "But we really have a culture of collaboration, not only with clients but internally. It's all about bringing on the right people to meet client needs."

Arriving at Goodwin Procter five years ago, Caplan dove right in. "I didn't have a meeting to try to convince partners," he says. "I just did it."

He set up meetings with organizations where he had connections, and invited the firm's partners along.

"The partners would be comfortable with me because I'm not too shy. I understand the business and I would sell the firm," Caplan explains. That meant talking about operations, not legal issues. "The more I did it, the more I got buy-in."

Now, Caplan says, lawyers across practice areas and regions are reaching out for him to join them on pitches, and he frequently talks about operational excellence alongside the firm's chairman at client meetings. That internal enthusiasm has also allowed him to recruit more top talent on the operations side.

"When I speak about this, people that think like this want to come here," Caplan adds.

As clients come to expect that firms will make room at the table for operations professionals, individuals with the right skill set can be increasingly choosy. Demand is rising.

At Ballard Spahr, Prince thinks her previous law practice has helped her gain acceptance. But her success has been conditioned on her willingness to become an expert in skills not taught in law school, like legal service delivery.

"You hear all the time about the dichotomy between lawyers in law firms and nonlegal professionals who are trying to work alongside them, but I think that's starting to change, especially as lawyers start to take on some of these positions," she says.

That's not a requirement. Hawkins has a background as a lawyer, but Caplan doesn't. Nor does Beekhuizen, who notes that although a legal background might make it easier to communicate with lawyers, his own perspective, informed by finance and process management, is equally valuable.

"I don't have any preconceived notions about how things should work," he says.

Full-throated, top-down support is more important. Caplan believes that managing partners and CEOs should be devoting resources to their firm's COO and professional staff, with a mind to support the management team and partnership, but also to help with client service.

"Law firms should think about how operational investment, because it is a big expense, can have a return on investment," Caplan says. "And that has to start with the COO or an executive director who's invested in that strategy."

That requires leaders who are willing to take chances to ensure their firms' success well into the future.

"Why would they want to make the change?" asks Jennifer Johnson Scalzi, CEO of Calibrate Legal, which helps law firms fill top-level nonlegal roles. "Change is hard. It has to be motivated by laying a foundation for the future, when they're long gone."

Even if a managing partner sees the need to make changes, firm dynamics can stand in the way. A new set of complications emerge when a top-level professional successfully embeds with a firm's managing partner, often to the exclusion of the rest of the partnership. Professor Laura Empson, who wrote about the phenomenon in her book, "Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas," warns about the frustrations this gulf can engender: "You scratch below the surface and the partners are saying, 'What are we doing? Why do they have so much time with the managing partner?'"

For Prince, some change is possible without support from leadership, but it won't be enough.

"What you need is a radical transformation," she says.

Mark Cohen, CEO of consultancy Legal Mosaic, questions whether this transformation is within most law firms' capabilities, regardless of how much clients want to see it.

"Where legal operations are being asked to function in a traditional partnership structure, it's going to be a very different culture and approach to legal operations than if those same people with the same skill sets were to be operating in a company like UnitedLex," he says. "In a company like UnitedLex, you've got lawyers working every day with people from other disciplines—computer science, engineering, data analytics, accounting. That's just the way their structure is. People who aren't licensed attorneys aren't second-class citizens."

Even if the rhetoric on the issue has changed in many firms, small gestures can be revealing. Not long ago, Empson was approached by a Magic Circle firm to speak with senior professional staff about the implications of her research. The firm struck the right tone, saying that it wanted her to address the organization's "senior management," rather than, for example, its "support staff." The nomenclature and commitment to professional development were proffered as evidence of the firm's regard for its professionals.

But when the firm put forth a figure, it revealed that its budget was less than half what Empson would have expected to receive for giving the same presentation to its partnership.

"It was such a telling fact," she says. "There was such a disconnect."

Cohen says he often hears the same refrain from people in the legal operations field, with varying degrees of frustration and anger: "I've got a fancy title within a law firm, but most of the large revenue drivers and rainmakers don't take what we do particularly seriously."

One strategy to change that is to build a pricing function first to gain traction and buy-in.

"If there's some kind of approval process for fee arrangements and rates, then the partners and the other lawyers in the firm need to work with you directly as a pricing person," Prince says. "It's a good way to develop a relationship."

That's not all, though.

"If you start out in one of these roles and you sit in your office and you email people and you don't try to walk the halls and go to people's offices and go to firm events where you might develop a relationship with them outside of work, it's incredibly hard," she says.

When that work leads to a client-facing role, it's a triumph for professionals with the skills to do bigger and better things.

"To get in the room with a client and listen to their needs and be able to help—their status with the firm may not be as secure as the fee earners, but they will certainly be held in a higher regard than others," Laws says.

Firms aren't off the hook, though. Those working exclusively with midmarket clients that lack extensive legal operations of their own may be able to withstand complacency. But those that service sophisticated global operations cannot.

"If they're not getting on board with installing some of these business professionals," Laws says, "they're going to be at a disadvantage at some point."