Category Archives: Alternative Fee Arrangements

Win-Win Alternative Billing Strategies

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This is the first installment of a three part series based on my presentation on “Win-Win Alternative Billing Strategies” at the CBABC Sixth Annual Branch Conference in Las Vegas November 18-20, 2011.

Current Situation

Alternative billing has been done in conjunction with commodity work for decades in Canada.  Fixed fees are common for personal services commodity legal work such as residential conveyances, wills, etc.  However, alternative billing is not common for most business law and litigation work in Canada. Canadian law firms are not proactively offering alternative billing to their clients either.  And clients aren’t happy about that!

Alternative billing is growing rapidly in the US and Europe, however.  Large clients are pushing big firms to offer alternative billing and they’re getting price discounts of 20% +.  This is what’s coming to Canada soon as well.  So you need to get ready for how to deal with that.

The New York State Bar Association “Report of the Task Force on the Future of the Legal Profession”, published in April, 2011, has a set of recommendations on alternative billing, and it predicts that alternative billing will be the dominant form of billing in the future in the legal industry. Clients are pushing for it, and Bar associations are supportive.

The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) is going to be setting up shop in British Columbia and Alberta soon, so it’s coming very fast.

What Do Clients Want From Alternative Billing?

Clients want lawyers to provide more value for money.  Legal chargeout rates have risen dramatically in the last decade, and clients want a price rollback!

Clients also want more predictability in legal costs.  They want fixed fees.  They want to be able to budget their legal costs as close as possible in order to satisfy their CEO’s desire to reduce overall legal costs.

Clients want law firms to share the risk when working for them.  At the moment, clients have all the risks under hourly billing.  Clients want to pay for results, not hours spent. If results aren’t achieved as planned, law firms should be sharing the downside as well.

Many clients are looking for lower overall legal costs.  Legal costs are spiralling out of control, and clients are fed up.

What Do Law Firms Want From Alternative Billing?

Law firms want to maintain or enhance profitability when doing alternative billing.

Law firms want to manage risks, and may prefer not to take on all the risk, but are willing to share risks with the client.  But the risks are a spectrum, and there is a different price all the way along the risk spectrum.  The more risk, the higher the risk premium, just like a stock portfolio.  The higher the return, the higher the risk.  Clients are willing to pay a premium for less risk as well.

Law firms want to retain clients, so they need to offer alternative billing, as clients are looking for it now.  And you want to offer alternative billing before your competitors offer it and steal your clients away.

Law firms want to satisfy clients, and alternative billing offers ways to satisfy clients even more than you are now!

Value Pricing – Part I

So what’s your unique value proposition?  What do you offer that no one else offers for the same value as you do?  Many firms do not focus on this question, and it’s the most important question you need to answer, because it’s the first question a client will be thinking about.  Why should I use you instead of your competitors?

You will need a unique value proposition in order to succeed with alternative billing.  If you don’t, it’s just about price, and that’s a losing game in the end.  You have to distinguish yourself from your competition in order to price at a premium and achieve profitability with fixed fees.

Ron Baker is a CPA who has been talking about the concept of value pricing for over 30 years.  He is the real guru of alternative billing.

Ron presents the formula: Value = Customer Profit minus Price.  What this means is that Value equals the impact your legal work has on a client’s profit less the price of your legal service.   Everything you do for a client will have a positive or negative impact on a client’s bottom line.

Some of the value you provide will be in the form of a tangible benefit, eg. hard dollars recovered or saved, and some will be intangible benefits such as enhanced reputation eg. client gets public financing with the help of your law firm’s blue-chip reputation.

The document “51 Practical Ways To Add Value” on the ACC website is an excellent overview of how you can add value for clients.  It is from a large firm’s point of view, but many of the points are relevant for small firms as well.

For example, ask the client what their strategic plan is. Many clients are very impressed by firms that actually talk to them to find out what their company goals are.  From there you can find out what the client values, and organize your legal services and resources in a way that can truly benefit the client.  And when you start thinking about the client’s profits before your own profits, then you really add value.  If you can help the client become more profitable, your profits will flow naturally as a result.

5 Major Trends Impacting Canadian Law Firms Today

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1) The Norton Rose Phenomenon

One of today’s key trends affecting law firms of all sizes in Canada is the Norton Rose phenomenon. Norton Rose is a 2,900 lawyer global giant, organized as a Swiss Verein, which has just gobbled up Ogilvy Renault and Macleod Dixon in two quick bites. Within a matter of months, they have singlehandledly changed the face of the Canadian legal industry, creating the third largest legal firm in Canada and they’re just getting started. That’s pretty incredible, and scary for some at the same time. This is the new order in Canada’s legal industry.

This is also a defining moment for the legal industry in Canada, and will potentially drive more mergers and changes in national and regional firms as Norton Rose presses its influence. It could force Canadian national firms to get bigger or they’ll be swallowed up as well. Other global giants such as DLA Piper are waiting in the wings.  At 4,000 plus lawyers it’s the largest law firm in the world.  Discussions are happening amongst multiple potential Canadian merger partners, with other global firms no doubt interested in Canada’s lucrative resources legal work as well.

There are many similarities to what the large accounting firms such as KPMG and Deloitte went through in the ‘80s and ‘90s, as they used Swiss Verein structures to build their global presences as well.  The Swiss Verein structure provides limited liability, world-wide branding and consistent client service standards as some of its features.

Large Canadian law firms are being influenced by the large accounting firms in many ways. In the 90’s, large Canadian law firms went national to protect against the feared onslaught of accounting firms, which fizzled out when Enron happened, but the large national law firms remained. Now there is pressure  again being exerted from the outside, and large firms will have to restructure to fight against this new enemy.  Rumour has it that the large accounting firms are looking to get back into the legal industry again as well.

As an adjunct trend, the rise of the ABS regulations in the UK is putting an even more interesting spin on Norton Rose’s arrival in Canada. ABS allows public ownership of law firms, which is happening right now as UK firms are lining up to go public. If this trend catches on in the UK, even more resources will become available to UK-based firms like Norton Rose, and the US may have to consider the possibility of allowing public ownership for US firms to compete with publicly owned UK firms. This could lead to the ultimate showdown of publicly-owned global law firms, which may lead the legal industry to look something like the big 4 accounting firms when the dust settles, or…? Stay tuned on this one :) .

2) Move to Corporate Model

Another trend happening simultaneously is the move to more corporate models of firm governance amongst large Canadian firms. McCarthy’s moved to a board of directors and a full corporate business model a few years ago, and other large and regional Canadian firms are now going the same way. Practice groups are consolidating on a national basis, similar to what the large accounting firms have done for decades.

3) Alternative Billing

Fee pressures from clients are being experienced by firms of all sizes in Canada. It ranges from the small firms that do commodity work such as residential conveyances for less than what notaries charge in British Columbia, to large firms that are being pressed by large clients to offer alternative billing arrangements such as fixed fees to provide more certainty and less risky billing options.

Alternative billing is not as advanced amongst large firms in Canada as it is in the US and Europe, however, it is coming and firms need to prepare. It is being felt in the banking and intellectual property areas already, for example. It has been prevalent in commodity work in Canada for decades eg. personal services law, residential conveyancing, wills and estates, etc.

Project management is another trend that midsize and large firms are embracing, as a forerunner or as an adjunct to alternative billing. The idea is to get as efficient and effective as you can, then use this efficiency to go out and compete in the fixed fee arena, and hopefully maintain or enhance profitability.

The whole concept of value is being embraced by clients, who are looking at the very high chargeout rates that law firms have brought in over the last decade, and they now want retribution and rollbacks, or at the very least a stop to the increase in their legal budgets. The rise of the ACC Value Challenge is just one indicator of their resolve here.

If the economy worsens in a possible double-dip recession, clients will exert even more pressure on law firms. Firms must prepare for this change in the client’s mindset and must demonstrate more value to satisfy clients.

There is also a movement to reduce the recovery of soft costs such as photocopies and fax charges, which irritates some clients, and law firms are pulling back on this somewhat.

4) National Firms Cleaning House

National firms are cleaning house and cutting partners with practices below minimum $ practice size and clients that don’t meet minimum $ billings levels. This is a great opportunity for small and regional firms, who are picking up these senior national partners who have been pushed out or who have left national firms for better work/life balance.

This can be a great boon for the smaller firm, as they acquire new talent and institutional clients, who will remain with the smaller firm after the partner finally retires. Many national partners have established long relationships with their clients, and are able to transition their clients to their new smaller firms and make them profitable with the lower overheads of a small firm.

5) The Rise of Innovative New Legal Business Models

The rise of innovative new business models such as Delegatus, Clearspire, Axiom, Cognition, etc. The concepts of outsourced in-house counsel, no partners, franchised firms and virtual firms are threats to national and regional firms and an opportunity for small firms.

“Non-law firm” legal service providers such as Thomson Reuters are also looking at getting into the business of providing legal services through their outsourcing arm Pangea3. The ABS regulations offer the potential of “Tesco law”, which opens up possibilities for many more non-legal entities to provide legal services as well. These are threats to traditional law firms of all sizes.

Presented at the Seventh Annual CBA Law Firm Leadership Conference held October 24-25, 2011 in Vancouver, BC

Planning for Success

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Originally posted on Small Firm Innovation

I’ve talked to a number of solo and small firm lawyers over the years about the topic of strategic planning, and often get asked the same question: “Isn’t strategic planning  just a “big firm” thing?”

The answer is that strategic planning is for firms of all sizes.  In fact, it’s even more important for solos and small firms in today’s competitive legal environment.  Solos and small firms can use strategic planning to focus their efforts and “steal” work from big firms by providing better value through lower rates and more flexible billing arrangements, for example.

“Isn’t strategic planning too time-consuming for our partners?”  It doesn’t have to be.  In fact, I will outline a straightforward question and answer process which will easily guide you through the planning steps and produce a strategic plan once you’ve answered all of the planning questions.

“But I’ve already got plenty of billable work which clients need me to do now!”  Yes, you may have lots of work now, but are you doing the kind of work you want to keep you intellectually satisfied, and is it producing the most amount of profit for the least amount of your time?  The strategic planning process will help you resolve these questions.

Where are you going?

You start by creating a vision for your firm and deciding what your practice or firm is going to look like in the long term.  What type of law will you practice, who will your clients be, how big will your firm be, will you have a “bricks and mortar” or “virtual” office?, etc.  You need to envision all of these things and look out 5, 10 or 15 years out for your vision of the firm.

The visioning process doesn’t have to be complicated.  Some large firms spend weeks or months creating a vision, as they have many partners who must come to a consensus on it.  But as a solo or small firm, you only have yourself or a few other partners to come to a decision on your vision, so the time required is much less.

The planning process usually involves taking some time out at a retreat to have partners think about the future of the firm, and is most likely facilitated by a third party.  This third party option usually works best, since all partners have vested interests, and you want someone independent to guide you through the process to ensure you have “buy in” from all partners.

Where are you at now?

Once you’ve figured out where you want to go, you need to confirm where you’re at now. What is your current profitability by practice area, who are your current people, what is your current management structure, what is your partnership entry criteria, etc.  You will need to do a SWOT analysis, which is a review of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to really define what your current position is.

Who are you?

This is the core values step. This involves creating a set of “values” for partner behavior which all partners are required to adhere to.  You need to decide “who’s in the boat” and who isn’t.  You need the right people to help you achieve your firm vision.

What are the steps required to achieve our vision?

Once you know where you’re going, who you are and where you’re at today, you need to figure out the steps needed to achieve your vision. These steps are known as goals, which will help you to determine if you’re making progress towards achieving your vision.  The goals need to be quantified, so you will know when you’ve reached each step along the way.

Next steps

These are the first key steps in the planning process, which will help you kick-start the creation of a new strategic plan for your firm.  In future posts, I will continue this series on strategic planning for solos and small firms.  We’ll fill in the details on how to complete your firm strategic plan and instill an ongoing strategic mindset to maximize your firm’s competitiveness and profitability for the long term.