With Validatum Pricing Espresso® we aim to bring you your regular pricing 'shot' - the best, most interesting, thought provoking and informative material we can find globally which will be of interest, relevance and help to you in your legal services pricing challenges. [Note: we don't always agree with the content of others that we post but the philosophy of Validatum Pricing Espresso® is shared perspectives, not a personal 'soap-box']

This is a three-part article, explaining how to deliver pricing and profitability analytics in the legal sector. This article goes back to basics and explores how you can ensure that your information systems support your firm’s decisions to improve profitability.

The next article will explore ways to calculate and analyse profitability. The third and final article will cover the use of analytics in pricing.

“The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. If you’ve got to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10% then you’ve got a terrible business”

Warren Buffett Chairman & CEO Berkshire Hathaway

With Validatum Pricing Espresso® we aim to bring you your regular pricing 'shot' - the best, most interesting, thought provoking and informative material we can find globally which will be of interest, relevance and help to you in your legal services pricing challenges. [Note: we don't always agree with the content of others that we post but the philosophy of Validatum Pricing Espresso® is shared perspectives, not a personal 'soap-box']

Law firms contemplating or in the throes of a merger, ignore or pay scant attention to harmonising the merging firms pricing cultures, governance, analytics and execution at their peril.

I must be one of the very few people that loves this time of year at work, hugely looking forwards to the excitement and uncertainty of the challenges that the year will bring. Planning my work for Q1 this year with Richard, we were reflecting on how we could help law firms better anticipate their clients' procurement strategy in 2017:

This is not the first time that we have written on this topic but two items that crossed our desk in the last week have galvanised us into raising the topic again. The first was an article appearing in The American Lawyer’s Am Law Daily that looked at some of the reasons contributing to the demise of King & Wood Mallesons.

With Validatum Pricing Espresso® we aim to bring you your regular pricing 'shot' - the best, most interesting, thought provoking and informative material we can find globally which will be of interest, relevance and help to you in your legal services pricing challenges. [Note: we don't always agree with the content of others that we post but the philosophy of Validatum Pricing Espresso® is shared perspectives, not a personal 'soap-box']

As PwC’s comprehensive 2013 study tells us……"Pricing matters".

Where else in the provision of goods and services could such small improvements have such a profound effect on the bottom line?

I was on the train from York to London last Wednesday morning, sitting next to a lady who was diligently scribbling notes onto an RFP document, and I couldn’t help but smile to myself as her colleague proceeded to vilify all procurement professionals the world over as unpredictable, unfathomable, picky and impossible to please. Apparently deep into a tender response that was due on Friday, they went on to discuss how they’d better not give the client any opportunity to disqualify them and someone had better spell-check it properly this time. (Should just say at this point that they were discrete enough not to mention who they worked for or were tendering to…)

With Validatum Pricing Espresso® we aim to bring you your regular pricing 'shot' - the best, most interesting, thought provoking and informative material we can find globally which will be of interest, relevance and help to you in your legal services pricing challenges. [Note: we don't always agree with the content of others that we post but the philosophy of Validatum Pricing Espresso® is shared perspectives, not a personal 'soap-box']

Legal disclaimer: Having captured your attention with a mildly provocative title to this blog, we better do the whole legal disclaimer thing. This is an opinion piece designed to stimulate discussion within law firms about what we see as an extremely dubious trend. It is not a legal opinion or legal advice and you rely on it as such at your peril.