Carnival of Value-Pricing and Fixed Price Models.

Aside from the Exemplar series in this blog, there are several very good discussions going on right now on value pricing and fixed price models: Michelle Golden, Ron Baker, David Galiconne GAL, I can’t think of a more difficult or more important subject for law practice managment. While it’s true that your gut is uncannily acurate on what price should be (or should have been) after a project is done, it’s much harder to estimate or even budget costs in advance–espcaically for contrntions deasl, regulatory pojects with mercurial blocs of the government and lititgqation. Since most of my own practice involves the second two, I am loathe to estimate costs much less put fixed prices on trial-type regulatory and litigation projects, as they are often unpredictable. So at my firm we don’t do it. In addition, when we actually litigate–which we at first try to prevent–our default postion is conduct ltigation thqt is intelligent yet as aggressive and as hard-charging as we can. We tale the travails of our clients almost persoanlly–especially if they have been sued themselves. Having said that, we explore anything good for the client on an almost daily basis. We want cleitns to be happy; if if our clients (so far they have been happy to pay by the hour and pay us very competitive rates) begin to demand fixed price options, we will likely fall in line. In the meantime, we put much effort into a billable hour, and clients keep paying thier bills. So we wait. We wait for actual experience in the marketplace to show that value billing (1) works for both clients and lawyers, and (2) can hold and command the energies of top legal talent.