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']
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Where’s the legal services pricing puck heading?
Where’s the legal services pricing puck heading? is a compelling interview with Richard Burcher, the leading authority on pricing legal services and contributor to the Dialogue on Remaking Law Firms.
Thank you for joining the Dialogue on Remaking Law Firms for a Q&A with me today, Richard.
In today’s hyper-competitive world for all types and sizes of law firms, how do the smart firms start when they decide to be more deliberate in the way they price their services? Read more...
Forum Magazine: Transparent Pricing — Legal Services Sold with a Price Tag, Not a Running Meter
The global legal service market will grow to more than $1 trillion after 2020. That is quite impressive — however, to the corporate clients who pay for these services, this increasing amount will generally be regarded as additional costs. And since most companies are under pressure to reduce their overall costs due to increasing competition and digital transformation journeys, they are also looking more critically at their legal spend than before.
This raises several key questions for general counsel: Do we pay too much to our legal service providers? And given the lack of transparency in current pricing techniques, how can we make sure we’re getting good value? Read more...
Law Firm Revenues Rise as Demand Accelerates, Citi Reports
There is a lot of good news in the nine-month 2019 industry results. While we might not end the year with the strong growth levels seen in 2018, we anticipate that 2019 will be a decent year. For the first time this year, revenue growth exceeded expense growth. Rate increases continued to be strong, while demand growth continued to accelerate. The collection cycle continued to lengthen, hurting revenue, but strong inventory growth places the industry in a solid position to end the year well.
These results are based on a sample of 190 firms (76 Am Law 100 firms, 54 Second Hundred firms and 60 niche/boutique firms). Thirty-one of these firms fit our definition of either international (less than 25% but more than 10% of lawyers based outside the United States) or global (at least 25% of lawyers based outside the United States). Citi Private Bank provides financial services to more than 700 U.S. and U.K. law firms and more than 50,000 individual lawyers. Each quarter, the Law Firm Group confidentially surveys firms in the Am Law 100 and the Second Hundred, along with smaller firms. In addition, we conduct a more detailed annual survey and semiannually produce the Law Firm Leaders Confidence Index. These reports, together with extensive discussions with law firm leaders, provide a comprehensive overview of current financial trends in the industry, as well as forward-looking insight. Read more...
Who is best placed to act as legal project manager?
Who is best placed to act as legal project manager?
This is a question I get asked a lot when discussing legal project management with practising lawyers.
In this post I will put the question in context and answer it. Read more...
The Fallacy of In-House Savings
I recently attended a conference that included both law firms and clients. One of the clients had a slide showing his company’s savings by bringing work in-house. It was the classic approach of comparing billing rates for law firm lawyers to hourly compensation rates of equivalent level in-house lawyers. Even though this lawyer was not a client of my firm, I still held my tongue on critiquing his math, since that would have been bad-form.
So I am doing it here.
That math is a poor representation of the situation. It is not very thoughtful and a bit lazy. But hey – I’m sure it looks good for the CFO. Here’s what it initially leaves out: Read more...
Hearing adjourned for ex-City partner accused over 'untrue' billable hours claim
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has agreed to adjourn a substantive hearing of allegations against a telecommunications solicitor for four months following a lengthy discussion on medical evidence.
A five-day substantive hearing was due to begin yesterday over allegations brought by the Solicitors Regulation Authority against Tracey Ann Sheehan, admitted in 1995.
The SRA alleges that Sheehan approved a proposal form submitted to the partnership admission committee of international firm Dentons which included 'untrue' information about her billable hours and fees when she was a partner at international firm Taylor Wessing. She is also alleged to have provided Hill Dickinson with a business plan and schedule of her hours and billings as part of a recruitment process containing 'untrue' information. The SRA says the allegations are as yet unproven. Read more...
