Fully Fixed-Price Legal Services: How Your Firm Can Make the Switch

Our regulation agency moved to a fixed-price authorized companies mannequin in 2009. After 15 years of expertise with this manner of working, listed here are our seven classes realized.

There’s a enormous curiosity in fixed-price authorized companies. We have now new purchasers asking us for particular prices every day. Based on current analysis, two out of three regulation agency purchasers need flat charges, but most companies stick with the long-maligned hourly charge mannequin.

Certainly, within the Authorized Traits Report’s corresponding survey of regulation companies, 97% supplied hourly billing, whereas simply 36% offered any sort of fixed-fee association.

On condition that demand for fixed-price authorized companies work is double the present provide, making a transfer to mounted pricing or flat charges might carry your regulation agency a big aggressive benefit. (To not point out the enterprise advantages of simplified billing and extra predictable budgets.) However on condition that hourly billing is so engrained within the authorized occupation — from how we cost purchasers to how we reward and encourage legal professionals — it’s not at all times a easy transition.

Listed below are seven classes we will share from our expertise.

1. Begin With a Full Spinal Transplant

Once more, acknowledge that the billable hour has been a core part of authorized DNA, and consciously or unconsciously, that enterprise mannequin impacts how your legal professionals apply, how the employees views their positions, and what either side contemplate success.

If you’re prepared to start out the method, you – all of you – should shift your viewpoint from the traditional strategy of lawyering to the purchasers’ objectives. Pardon the cliche, however it’s not concerning the journey, it’s concerning the vacation spot. Shoppers don’t rent you to start out a patent utility, seek for prior artwork, revise the applying, and so forth; they rent you to get them patent safety.

Whereas billable hours conditioned us to rejoice every of those steps, a fixed-price mannequin prioritizes the shopper’s final objectives.

(Associated studying: “Moral Concerns for Flat Price Billing” by Mark C. Palmer.)

2. Establish the Shoppers’ Objective Locations

Draw in your staff’s collective expertise to make a listing of the “locations” your purchasers wish to attain — in different phrases, their private or enterprise objectives. For instance, at an IP boutique like ours, this might embody acquiring a design patent, a utility patent or trademark safety.

3. Decide Honest Pricing for Every Vacation spot

For every of those locations, decide a good worth your purchasers could be keen to pay. Don’t simply rely by yourself billing historical past for this; assessment what is obtainable in the marketplace and ask a few of your purchasers too.

Your truthful costs needs to be aggressive throughout the market, financially favorable to the agency, and achievable by your present workforce. Junior legal professionals could value you much less on an hourly foundation, but when they want significantly extra time to finish assignments, it’s possible you’ll be higher served to dedicate extra senior legal professionals to sure initiatives.

Additionally, if you’re going to break your goal-based pricing into phases, the phases ought to align with when purchasers make enterprise choices. The phases shouldn’t be based mostly on when predictable attorney-known steps will occur. For instance, with a trademark submitting, the whole lot associated to a submitting is one stage, however when there’s an objection from the trademark workplace, there’s new knowledge {that a} shopper could wish to contemplate as a part of a enterprise choice earlier than continuing. Nonetheless, receiving the acknowledgment of receipt of the applying from the Trademark Workplace is completely predictable and shouldn’t set off one other stage within the mission.

Lastly, there is no such thing as a accounting for third events, so we nonetheless have some hourly initiatives, however we reserve them for litigation or licensing after we can’t account for the way the third social gathering will behave.

4. Launch Your Mounted Price Menu and Adapt

What if purchasers aren’t keen to pay what you’ve decided is a good worth? Cease doing these initiatives. It’s OK to determine to not do sure issues in case you can’t align the “market charge” with your individual prices. Setting truthful mounted costs is an effective way to determine work it is best to select to not do since you are dropping cash on it — purchasers merely is probably not keen to pay the truthful market worth of that work.

5. Search for Efficiencies Via Expertise and Staffing

Regulation companies with a strict hourly mannequin are usually slower to embrace know-how; they worry sure efficiencies will threaten billable work — which then jeopardizes timekeepers’ salaries and bonuses. Mounted-fee companies, nevertheless, perceive that the extra expeditiously a matter could be dealt with, the extra worthwhile it turns into.

What know-how can enhance your pace or capability? At AEON Regulation, we switched from a guide trademark search and assessment course of to an AI-optimized mannequin the place the primary go of the search outcomes is collated and prioritized utilizing AI evaluation.

On the identical time, what may very well be transferred from the legal professionals’ desks to cheaper employees? The legal professionals should deal with the true work product, however delegate as a lot administrative work as attainable. Get artistic; we now have paired every of our legal professionals with internationally credentialed digital assistants. The legal professionals have devoted employees assets at a fraction of the in-person or native worth.

6. Change Your Compensation System

The unintended consequence of hourly billing is that it rewards legal professionals who “pad” their billing, churn out pointless work, or ship out a number of revisions. Mounted-fee fashions can align your legal professionals’ and your purchasers’, pursuits, however it can’t occur with out addressing how legal professionals are paid.

Legal professional compensation ought to correspond to the worth of the initiatives they ship to purchasers. Effectivity needs to be rewarded — they have to be incentivized to ship the very best draft the primary time. Whereas each agency is totally different, this may be performed by way of a balanced scorecard strategy, commissions, or a clear bonus program the place legal professionals can earn more cash by attaining sure price range thresholds.

(Associated studying: “The Finest Regulation Agency Compensation Corporations Use the Rule of Thirds” by Brooke Full of life)

Safeguard Your Money Movement

An exquisite aspect impact of the predictability of mounted costs is that it permits for extra predictable accounting. We are able to now ask for fee initially of a mission as a sign to start out doing the work, thereby lowering our accounts receivable and permitting the agency to scale extra simply.

When performed proper, fixed-price fashions profit all events concerned: Shoppers obtain their objectives quicker, legal professionals are liberated from the chore of time-tracking and really feel in command of their compensation and workload, and the agency itself eliminates the chance of growing old accounts receivable.

It’s completely attainable — and our agency’s historical past is a testomony to that — however it requires a willingness to experiment and a collective settlement to kill the billable hour.

Picture © iStockPhoto.com.

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