Pricing for law firms

There can't be many lawyers who enjoy negotiating fees or taking calls from unhappy clients who have just looked at their fee note. Pricing and price discussions tend to feel like problems, to be avoided as far as possible.

At the same time, maximising fee income is clearly critical to the success of the firm – and of individual partners and associates, whose status and career prospects are closely linked to the income they generate.

The days when lawyers could rely on working on an hourly rate, increasing year on year, are fast disappearing. A more sophisticated approach to pricing helps you win new clients, strengthens relationships and builds your reputation for offering good value. Read more...

Starting legal project management development in law firms

If you develop, or are helping to develop, a new legal project management practice in your law firm, what should you do?

In this post I suggest four steps new and emerging legal project management (LPM) teams should take when developing their legal project management practice.

The collective aim of these steps is to help promote understanding and deployment of legal project managers and the LPM function by practising lawyers. Read more...

IWD 2022: Billable hours and gender representation: turning nouns into verbs

Law firms recognise the importance of equality, diversity and inclusion, and they recognise the need to have a diverse workplace; after all, a large number of studies demonstrate that a more diverse workplace is better for business. Many law firms have cultures and values which embed these important nouns into their business models, and many actively seek to uphold such values throughout their business, attempting to break the bias. While statistics show a slow but steady increase in diversity among all lawyers (based on the SRA’s survey of diversity carried out in 2021, when compared with its 2019 survey) the gender gap at more senior levels remains a challenge, with just 35 per cent of partners being female (compared to 61 per cent of solicitors being female). Read more...

Evaluating tender opportunities – is this a client you really want?

Evaluating tender opportunities can be tricky. There’s a real tendency to ‘go for it’ in many organisations at any ‘cost’ once an RFT/P is released.

Evaluating tender opportunities – 5 lenses to try

This blog shares 5 lenses (or frameworks) to help you think more critically when evaluating tender opportunities. This reduces your organisation’s risk of squandering scarce time and precious resources in pursuing poor-fit clients or tenders with low prospects of success. Read more...

Lack of progress on innovative pricing ‘deep rooted issue’ for legal profession, new research finds

Thomson Reuters report calls for renewed effort by legal departments and their outside counsel to collaborate more effectively.

Efforts to adopt innovative pricing structures appear to be waning due to the ‘persistent frustrations’ of both law firms and their clients, according to new research which has found that 75% of matters are still billed on an hourly-rate basis.

That is a key finding of the Thomson Reuters 2022 State of Corporate Law Departments Report, which calls on in-house legal teams and their external counsel to renew efforts to collaborate more effectively. Read more...

86% of Law Firms Facing Pricing + Billing Pressure – Can Legal Tech Help?

A survey of around 200 UK lawyers by litigation finance group, Harbour, has found that many firms, both large and small, are facing pressure to reduce fees, and/or rely less on traditional billing methods. But can legal tech help?

The data shows that while 86% overall faced these pressures, firms across different market segments saw similar messages from the clients, with the ‘lower to middle half of the UK 100’ or £50m to £100m revenue firms facing the most pressure at 95.6%. Read more...