We, as a profession, are terrible at pricing. Awful. Lost. Clueless. Atrocious. Self-immolatory. I could go on, but only to hammer home the point, so that we can come to accept it more easily. The shoe fits, so we might as well wear it.
The High Price of Poor Pricing
This is a great blog post from Jordan Furlong, a partner at Edge International.
The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The average lawyer, by contrast, knows the value of everything but the price of nothing.
You’ve got to admit there’s something to that. We lawyers go on at great length about the value we deliver to our clients, the signal importance of having a lawyer on the case, the critical knowledge and skills we bring to the table, etc. A lawyer will leave his client in no doubt about the value he supplies. But that same lawyer, in almost every case, will be unable to assign a price to that value.
We can provide rates, sure — but rates aren’t prices, in the same way that speed is not distance unless you add time. Unless the matter is utterly routine and predictable, most lawyers cannot or will not answer the most straightforward client question in the world: “How much will I pay you for this?” We panic. We freeze up. We die a little. We resort to myths and excuses, and as we natter on, we see the client’s face fall.. Read more of this article...
