Legal Research

"If Clients Aren't Demanding Alternative Fees, Should Your Firm Pursue Them?"

This post was written by Allison Shields: "Earlier this month, Larry Bodine did a piece on the Law Marketing Portal about alternative fees entitled, "Study Finds Weak Client Demand for Alternative Fees," in which he talked about the Center for Competitive Management (C4CM)'s  2010 Alternative Billing Benchmarking Study.*

...Reportedly, one of the reasons clients have not embraced alternative fees is that they are not well understood by either clients or lawyers. The C4CM report listed a number of obstacles to implementing alternative fees from the perspective of law firms and law departments, including lack of historical data to evaluate whether alternative fees would be profitable, lack of 'buy in' from key firm personnel, lack of skills to implement alternative fees and the ease of continuing with the existing system, which is configured for hourly billing and compensation based upon hours.

From the law department perspective, obstacles included a lack of incentives for in-house personnel to use alternative systems, difficulty in comparing costs among different firms if others are billing hourly, concern about whether firms billing under alternative arrangements would be as accountable as those billing hourly, and again, the difficulty of altering existing systems and measurements which were based on an hourly system.

What does this mean for lawyers and law firms? Should you abandon the idea of alternative billing? Not necessarily - especially for smaller firms and those working with clients who don't already have well-established measuring systems based upon hours or who aren't using multiple firms..."

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Source: Legal Ease Blog, 16 June 2010, reproduced with permission of the author.

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on June 18, 2010 (boomark / email).