value pricing

10 takeouts from BigHand’s Legal Pricing & Budgeting Report

I’m a cynic, so usually read industry reports published by industry providers with a huge pinch of salt, but every now and then you get an exception to the rule. So is the case with BigHand’s recently published ‘The Legal Pricing & Budgeting Report’, which is full of really insightful information (so read it!).

Here are my 10 take-outs (NA = North America and UK = UK):-

From

The damning:

To the surprising:

To some obvious:

And some knowns:

With a few, “What the?” (as in, only…)

With a great conclusion:

10.

As I said, as a rule I don’t recommended reading these types of reports as they typically are a waste of time; but this is one I have no problem saying “go read it!” – and if you have any thoughts/comments, post them in the comments section below!

Have a great week all.

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Do you know the 5 Cs of Value?

My friend John Chisholm hit the big time last week, he made the front-cover of Issue No.5 2021 of Legal Business World. All joking aside, John’s article ‘Who subscribes to your law firm?‘ (starts on page 8) is a really good read.

One of the gems I took away from John’s article is what he calls: ‘The 5Cs of Value’, which are (in his words):

Comprehend value to clients.
Create value for clients.
Communicate the value you create.
Convince clients they must pay for value.
Capture value with strategic pricing based on value, not costs and effort.

These are really good cornerstones to have, even if you don’t subscribe to John’s views of value-based pricing (did you see what an did there 🤪).

In any event, if you are new to the concepts of subscription and value based pricing, read the article because you’ll get a lot out of it.

And if you want to know more about the important topic of value based pricing in law firms, call him – but make sure to extract as much value as you can from him!

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Report: Eight of the biggest challenges law firms associate with rates and pricing

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After a great holiday enjoying the Northern Hemisphere summer – and thereby avoiding some of the cold winter of Sydney – I returned last week to a read about law firm rates and pricing that really caught my attention, the ‘LawVision & Peer Monitor Pricing Survey: The Growing Prominence of Pricing within Law Firms‘.

Predominately North American based, it’s nonetheless an interesting read – with some contentious stuff (see the ‘LawVision Maturity Curve’ for example) – for anyone even remotely interested in following the current trends and traits affecting law firm pricing issues. But what particularly grabbed my attention in this Report was the ‘8 biggest challenges law firms associate with rates and pricing’ (Figure 3):

And what really, really fascinated me about this list is how few of them actually have anything to do with either rates (if that’s the way you want to do things) or pricing.

As you can see from the list, in desending order they are:

Managing cash leaks across the entire rates lifecycle (discounts, writedowns, writeoffs, collections) – my comment: neither a rates issue nor a pricing issue, but a behavioural issue
Educating the lawyers in the firm on pricing principles – my comment: neither a rates issue nor a pricing issue, but a training issue
Managing rate discounts requested by clients – my comment: neither a rates issue nor a pricing issue, but a behavioural issue (and are we seriously still having this conversation!)
Negotiating with clients about the firm’s value and rate/pricing alignment
Putting in place a disciplined pricing process – my comment: neither a rates issue nor a pricing issue, but a training issue
Managing profitability – my comment: neither a rates issue nor a pricing issue, but an accounting issue
Developing alternative fees
Pitching for work generally or through the RFP process – my comment: can someone please let me know what this has to do with either rates or pricing!

Which leaves us with:

Negotiating with clients about the firm’s value and rate/pricing alignment, and
Developing alternative fees

Both of which, depending where in the buying cycle these conversations are taking place with your customer, could actually have something to do with a rates and pricing discussion.

But seriously, Challenges 4 & 7 of 8, and we wonder why law firms struggle with the concept of pricing and the disconnect between firm and customer.

And if we are really being honest and true to our clients, then even inward looking the #1 issue should not be ‘Managing cash leaks across the entire rates lifecycle (discounts, write¬downs, write-offs, collections)‘ but should rather be: ‘How are we rewarding and incentivising in our staff?‘ – because if the answer to that is ‘utilisation‘, then everything above is relatively meaningless.

As always though, interested in your thoughts/views/feedback.

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What the year 2081 will mean for law firm discounts

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Over the holiday’s I finally got time to read D. Casey Flaherty’s ‘Unless You Ask: A Guide For Law Departments To Get More From External Relationships‘ published by the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC).

Casey’s publication is excellent and very insightful. Although written for in-house legal departments, it contains information that every private practice lawyer should be across. If for no other reason than it has an array of sample questions they may be asked.

But, it is a brief piece in the publication on asking for discounts on hourly rates/bills that I wanted to share with you all. Because Casey has managed to put into words, both succinctly and comprehensively, my own feelings on discounts.

So here it is (see pages 64 & 65):

Without some grounding in value, discounts just become a game.

First, you can only push the discount lever so many times. A recession hits or you run a convergence initiative. You get your firms to take a big haircut. What’s next? It will probably be a few years before you can return to that well in any meaningful way. Continuous improvement, on the other hand, should be a constant. There is always some process to refine, some assumption to question, or some technology to take better advantage of. Discounts can be part of a strategy. But a strategy that relies entirely on discounts is hollow.

Second, there is a huge volume of data that suggests that while most clients see themselves as negotiating progressively deeper discounts, what they are really doing is negotiating down the size of the rate increase. Last year, the client got a 10% discount off a $500 rate. This year, the client gets an 11% discount off a $520 rate. What really happened is that that firm increased the rate from $450 to $463. You can perform this trick—4% rate increase, additional 1% discount—for a quite long time before the rate flattens out. How long? 66 years. In 2081, the paid rate ($1,600/hr) would finally stop increasing as the discount (75% off a published rate of $6,399/hr) caught up to the rate increase.

Third, while almost every law department will proudly refer to the deep discounts they’ve negotiated, only about half even get one. That’s because a true discount is not calculated versus a lawyer’s published rate—of which there may be several—but is calculated by reference to something called a standard rate, an internal firm number used to determine realizations, profitability, etc. With a few exceptions, almost no one pays published rate and therefore everyone thinks they are getting a discount. But only about half of clients actually pay below standard rate. And even they are not getting as deep a discount as they think.

Fourth, if you count discounts as savings, please stop. If you’ve reduced rates below what you were paying previously, that’s one thing, especially if you also have a mechanism to monitor and hold the line on hours. But if you are just counting the delta between the published rate and your paid rate, it introduces some bizarre incentives. It encourages firms to jack up published rates so they can offer you the optical illusion of a bigger discount. It encourages you to select higher priced firm so you can report greater ‘savings’—i.e., you show double the savings by paying $700/hr to a lawyer with a published rate of $900/hr than you do paying $350/hr to a lawyer with a published rate of $450/hr. And your savings accumulate with every extra hour of work the firm bills. There is something inherently perverse about a savings metric that makes you look better the more you spend.

Fifth, finally, and most importantly, undue emphasis on discounts tends to confuse unit price with total cost. Rate differences are linear. Hours can differ by orders of magnitude. The $350/hr associate might look relatively cheap until it takes them ten hours to deliver work half as good as what the $800/hr partner delivered in one. Attention to the unit price ($350 v. $800) will obscure both quality and total cost ($3,500 v. $800). We intuitively understand the difference experience can make. Systems—the proper integration of process and technology to augment expertise in delivering legal services—are experience institutionalized. Systems merit attention in trying to understand the relationship among quality, unit price, and total cost. Discounts are only a small fraction of one piece of that puzzle.

There you have it: why discounts should not be anywhere near the front of your pricing arsenal.

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R.I.P. AFAs in 2017?

I thought I would start my calendar year of blogging off with a slightly controversial post:

Will 2017 be the year that we finally sees the demise of so-called Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs)?

For those unfamiliar with the various types of AFAs currently in use – and there cannot be many of you out there, then Patrick on Pricing’s Continuum of Fee Arrangements is a good starting point.

Okay, so a fair amount was made of a chart in a ‘ACC Report – Law Department Management: Establishing Value In An Evolving Business World’ published late last year which predicted a 50% increase in the use of Alternative Fees this year. Given the ACC is the leading voice for in-house counsel globally, including, now, Australia, pretty clear evidence of the future direction of AFAs you’d think.

But, to my knowledge, little has been made of the fact that the same chart foresaw a 30% decrease in the use of Alternative Fees this year by those same in-house counsel.

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And so I asked myself: Given their popularity, what could possibly be driving in-house to contemplate a reduction in their use of AFAs? This is especially so given that the ACC has very much been at the forefront of championing their use? And, potentially, in such large numbers?

The truth is, I don’t know the answer to this question. It could be as simple as the fact that in-house counsel expect to instruct out less work that fits the AFA model. But I also hazard a guess that with some in-house counsel it will have something to do with one or all of the following three possible reasons:

AFAs are not transparent – no one, apart from the person who sets them, knows how they got to tat price. As such, it’s really difficult to compare them.
AFAs don’t represent value. Despite a belief that they represent value over hourly billing, in the view of many in-house counsel they simply don’t. Therefore, much easier to use the foe you know (hourly billing with discounts).
AFAs are not alternatives. Simply put, the core to most AFAs proposed by law firms remains: Units of Labour (manpower) x Time x Rate = Price. QED, they are not “alterative”. Indeed, their very names even suggest it with “blended”, “phase”, “task”, “volume”, “flat”.

To be clear, I don’t want to see the demise of value pricing. Indeed, quite the opposite. Nor am I particularly an advocate of hourly billing. I am however, wholly against the use of the term “alternative” when they clearly aren’t. And so I’m not overly surprised that 30% of in-house counsel are saying they will see a decline in their use this year.

Given the glacial speed of change in the the industry, I’ll wait to see if there is any change here this year. My gut tells me though not to hold my breath and that we are likely to be in the same place next year as we are now.

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