Not exactly sure where I came across this pricing menu by a translation service provider in Malaysia – Lexup – so apologies if I am not giving you the credit you deserve because this really grabbed my attention.
A translation service focussed on the legal profession that not only charges by the minute (let alone 6 minute units), but whose rates vary depending on how urgent your need is.
Alternatively, if you’re not happy with the hourly billing model, then let’s go old school (Charles Dickens era) and pay by the word. Again though, the quicker you want your work back, the more it will cost you!
Peak-load pricing. I have no idea why law firms have not adopted this years ago!
As usual comments are my own – but I’m sure there is someone out there who can tell me the optimum price to time!
In Episode 748 (7 July 2020) of HBR’s Ideacast podcast (23.04), Curt Nickisch interviews Rafi Mohammed, founder of the consulting firm ‘Culture of Profit’, on the topic of ‘Pricing Strategies for Uncertain Times‘.
During the course of the conversation Nickisch states that with COVID-19 service/product providers will be under intense pressure from clients/customers to offer discounts, to which Mohammed replies:
Clearly, in the short-run, you have to offer a discount. And what I would be focused on is what I call discounting with dignity in a manner that doesn’t devalue your product in the long run. And so, that’s really important because once you set a low price, it’s very hard to recover when demand eventually does come back.
And so we turn to how this really important concept applies to law firms
Blind Freddy can tell you that clients are under intense pressure to cut costs. I doubt there is a CFO out there who has not phoned (or even Zoomed) his/her GC and told them to cut costs.
And I suspect there are few GCs out there who have not responded by calling, zooming or even emailing the law firms on their legal panel to tell them to reduce rates by X%.
And, having lived through the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and the GFC of 2008, I suspect there are few law firms partners who have not passed along this request to their Finance Department with a note to “make it happen“.
But if this sounds familiar, and if a law partner you know would or has done this (*because it is never us*), then you would be missing out on Mohammed’s very powerful ‘discount with dignity‘ concept.
Because, as much a I hate advocating or agreeing to discounts, Mohammed is right:-
If you offer a discount to customers/clients merely because we are going through turbulent (or should I be saying ‘unprecedented’ 🙂 ) times, then what you are really doing is devaluing your service/product in the long term.
Because what you are saying to your customer/client when you unconditionally agree to a discount request of this kind is that “you have been over paying me all this time” – I’m not really worth what you have been paying me.
A Suggested Alternative Approach
Much like scoping in Legal Project Management methodology, when it comes to discounting (and I’m realistic enough to know that there needs to be some consideration of discounting in current times), you need to be considering what you take out of the basket when you offer that discount.
Which is to say it isn’t a ‘like for like’ for less conversation – you don’t get the same for less. If you take 15% off, you take 15% out of the basket. And you look to alternatives to how that can be sourced – either in-house or some other way (including LPOs/ALSPs).
And, if it really does need to be ‘like for like, but for less’ then it needs to come with a risk sharing collar. For example, I will accept 80% of my fees, but if we get past COVID-19 and your share price returns to pre-COVID highs within 6 months of completing this deal, then you agree to pay me 120% of my fees.
And, in the very worst of scenarios, your invoice should include a line item that states the discount being given is a one-off COVID-19 discount (and Mark Stiving, of Impact Pricing, has an interesting thought on this issue).
Regardless of what it is, you do need to do something. You cannot standstill for less. Because we will get past COVID. And in the ‘new world’ (even if that is a world where we merely live with COVID) there will be a ‘new, new normal’. And if you have agreed to discount your rates now without taking anything out of the basket, then what you have actually done is recalibrated your value in the new world.
And you won’t recover from that.
As always, the above just represent my own thoughts and would love to hear your thoughts.
For those who have not read it, Izaret and Schurmann’s Whitepaper provides some really thought-provoking insights, including:
Progressive pricing scales prices up or down on the basis of the value an individual customer derives.
the levels of pricing under progressive pricing are value-based, not means-based
Progressive pricing seems to violate the rules of traditional economics, which assume that customers buying the same product or service will pay the same price.
Progress pricing enables providers to offer each customer a fair, personalized product and price point.
In essence, progressive pricing enables service providers, such as law firms, to calibrate the value they provide at an individual customer level.
But, importantly to Izaret and Schurmann (see #4 of their ‘four most important differences between progressive and traditional pricing approaches‘):
Progressive pricing is a fairer way to determine prices, because customers pay a price proportional to the value they receive, rather than paying the same fixed price others pay.
For any supporters of value-based pricing, the above quote is pure gold.
But, the caveat in next line of Izaret and Schurmann’s piece is probably more crucial:
But the firm must make the case for this perceived fairness
QED, it is the duty of the firm to communicate the value the customer is getting, not the customer!
As a growing advocate of value-based pricing in professional services, one of the greatest take-outs for me was this line:
Making progressive pricing a profitable day-to-day reality can happen only if firms change how they create, define, and measure value so that they can share it fairly.
All I can say to that is “amen” – because it isn’t going to come out of utilisation and realisation rates, no matter how hard you look!
It is such a great piece I’m going to leave you with the following three quotes from this paper:
Companies must first step back and re-imagine the concept of value in their market. How can a business combine its own capabilities with the close personal knowledge of its customers to create something that fundamentally changes a customer’s life?
Can you define value, measure it, and get everyone to agree on what value is?
Most firms are accustomed to expressing prices in units of product or some other basic metric such as hours. If they can instead calibrate prices in terms of unit of value, then the price per unit of value can remain constant and the amount a customer pays can scale in proportion to the value demanded. That is the essence of fairness.
Great read. If it is not on your list – add it* (*then get back to me and let me know if you agree)!
I trust everyone had a relaxing and enjoyable holiday period. I certainly did, and took the opportunity to catch-up on some podcasts I had missed towards to the end of 2019. One of those was Episode 47 of Mark Stiving’s weekly Impact Pricing.
In this episode Mark has a free-ranging talk with Kevin Christian on all things pricing related under the appropriately named ‘Two Pricing Experts Talk Pricing‘ (published 9 December 2019) and, while the whole podcast is great, things get particularly interesting around the 19 minute mark when Kevin asks Mark:
“If a bear gets in a fight with an alligator, who wins?”
Now I can hear you saying: “What has this got to do with law firm business development and pricing issues?”, but – pun intended – ‘bear’ with me.
Because, as is music to the ears of every lawyer, Kevin explains,
‘it depends’ –
on where the fight is taking place.
If the fight is taking place on land then the bear is more likely to win; but if the fight is taking place in water then the alligator is more likely to win.
Que?
Here goes – bears and alligators are analogies to the ‘value’ discussion such that, as Kevin states, if you are:
Talking about the ‘Value of your Solution’: then you are in the seller/vendor territory and the seller/vendor is going to be leading and benefiting from the conversation;
whereas:
If you are only talking about the ‘Price of your Solution‘, without talking about the value, then you are in the buyer’s territory.
Takeout – what does this mean?
In a world when we deal with procurement and other agents who are not looking at the value of the service we provide, but are constantly looking at the cost of that service; then, as law firms, it becomes imperative that we explain the value being provided and have ourselves a land battle with the alligators.
This week’s episode of the Impact Pricing podcast (episode 20 – ‘Mastering SaaS Pricing: How to Price and Package Your Service’) sees host Mark Stiving talking with Kyle Poyar, Vice President for Market Strategy at OpenView. By their own admission, Mark and Kyle geek-out over SaaS pricing theory and its KPIs, so this podcast is not for everyone.
What is interesting, however, is the response Kylie gives to a question Mark asks at the 23 minute 37 second mark.
Mark’s question:
What do you see as the biggest pricing problem that subscription companies are having today?
Kylie’s response:
…structurally speaking, companies are not spending enough time on pricing, they don’t take a scientific or rigorous enough approach to optimising their pricing and testing it and collecting data on it. And we have gotten smart about just about everything in technology and if you look at the level of sophistication of the operations of a technology company it’s like just so different from where we were a few years ago. But pricing hasn’t really changed and I’ve just started to hear of companies that are trying to bring on pricing talent and make their first dedicated pricing hire and have that happen earlier in their lifecycle; but then those companies are having trouble figuring out what’s the right profile to hire for, who is going to do a good job in this role, and then finding that talent and so I think like, structurally, their biggest challenge is just lack of great pricing skills…
In my opinion, that sums up pretty well the pricing problem that we have in law firms:- we’re in such a rush to show everyone how serious we are about the pricing issue/problem facing the industry (as in, alternatives to the billable hour, project management, process improvement etc), that we have hired Heads of Pricing by the boat loads, but a niggling issue remains – industry report after industry report that has sought feedback from clients indicates (some might even say, shows) that we haven’t gotten all that much more sophisticated or even better about how we price. If that’s the case, we have to ask: is there just a lack of great pricing skills in the industry?
As always, interested in your thoughts/views/feedback.
NB: please ignore all comments Kylie makes about volume discounts prior to his comments above, as regular readers will know I don’t hold with those views!
Today (28 December 2018), Lawyers Weekly in Australia published an article by Lachlan McKnight, CEO of LegalVision in which Lachlan comments on his ‘Observations on NewLaw in Australia in 2018‘. At the outset I should state that I don’t know Lachlan, and this post is no way directed at him, but is just a numbered-point muse on the interesting observations he makes in his article.
‘NewLaw’ (which is as meaningless a term as ‘Mid-tier’) is now an ‘industry’ – now that’s interesting.
Agree with Lachlan’s comment in #1.
While I agree with Lachlan’s comments in #2, I also believe the attitude here is changing within the more ProgressiveLaw firms. ProgressiveLaw firms realise that with greater risk (which fixed fees actually are), there should be a premium (much as there is with any insurance premium). EvolutionaryLaw firms go one step further and start to have a conversation about ‘value’ pricing.
Three is an interesting comment: aren’t LegalVision in part owned by G&T – as an aside (re #3 above), didn’t Danny Gilbert recently state that he thinks that clients don’t want move away from the #BillableHour?. Nevertheless, I agree with a lot of what Lachlan says in #3 but would probably set the bar at $75 million (we still only have a population of 25 million and IBISWorld still only puts the WHOLE legal industry revenue in Australia at $20bn [NB: the top 30 law firms in Australia make over $50m a year – in an industry this small!]).
I would totally disagree with Lachlan’s comments in 4 and in my opinion you only need to look at the stuff MinterEllison and KWM are doing (with whom I have no association) to see this point – to me – is misplaced. In fact I would go 180 and say many BigLaw firms are going through their Arthur Andersen/Accenture moment (the original ‘child eat parent’?).
The biggest challenge NewLaw (and Mid-tier law if such a thing exists) has to #5 isn’t OldLaw, it’s the #Big4.
Number 6 is a point I have tried raising several times this year – scale. Law (Old and New) see ‘scale’ as being bodies (in part because of time-based billing). If it ever was it not longer is and any law firm, new or old, that get’s the right answer to scale will have a point of difference and in such a competitive market this is crucial. The reality is that potentially the biggest winners here should be the so-called Mid-tier (who have a lot of the grey haired industry knowledge without, currently, the scale – but I fear they have missed the boat because of lack of investment).
You hear a lot these days about ‘pricing‘. This might be as it relates to Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs)or Value-based pricing (VBP).
Indeed, all the noise around this issue can get daunting at times.
So for today’s post I thought I would share a graphic that I have created from the many RFTs (tenders), RFQs (quotes), RFPs (proposals) that I have been involved in over the years and which I have named: “What are my pricing options?“.
Also, I’ll let you in on a little secret:- there’s isn’t such as thing as an “Alternative Fee Arrangement” – only pricing options or fee arrangement. Likewise, if properly explained and clearly transparent, all pricing options are value-based.
There’s one caveat I have though: any pricing option that includes a ‘discount’ or ‘volume discount’ component isn’t a pricing option – as you’re not getting your asking price!
I hope your find the graphic useful and if this is a subject you are interested in learning more about I would suggest you start with the Association of Corporate Counsel’s (ACC) Value-based fee primer.
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