DEFINING ‘VALUE’ IN A TIME OF UNPREDICTABILITY
The pandemic of 2020-2021 led to considerable upheaval in many aspects of business, from office arrangements to reliance on technology. A less-appreciated effect of that pandemic is that it has intensified the interest of corporate clients in realizing greater value from their professional-service providers, including outside lawyers. Defining value has become more important than ever.
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Getting Away from the Hourly Rate: Clearing the Hurdles (Part 1)
What obstacles prevent clients and the law firms that represent them from moving from time-based billing to alternative fee arrangements? This article explores ways of overcoming those barriers.
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Getting Away from the Hourly Rate: The Counterproductive Effects of Billing Time (Part 2)
How does time-based billing impact adversely the client-counsel relationship? What are the implications of that situation?
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Getting Away from the Hourly Rate: An Efficient, Effective Team Maximizes Value (Part 3)
How does the composition of the team that collectively represents the client affect the client’s receipt of value for its fee-related expenditures?
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Getting Away from the Hourly Rate: Ready, Set, Go! (Part 4)
In light of the challenges and opportunities identified vis-à-vis alternative fee arrangements, how can counsel and client launch their effort to reduce the prevalence of time-based billing?
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Expert Q&A on Alternative Fee Arrangements
How should an in-house attorney approach the task of designing and implementing a fee arrangement based on something other than just the amount of time spent by outside counsel on the matter? How can the arrangement be best aligned with the client’s goals? This discussion explores those and related issues.
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Disputes and Litigation: Tame the Two-Headed Beast
The responsibility of in-house counsel to manage their companies’ positions in disputes and litigation in order to maximize those organizations’ chances of a successful outcome requires those attorneys to approach the task with a view to value and by incorporating compliance-related concerns in the effort.
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Incorporating Value into the Strategic Planning Process
A corporate law department should develop a strategic plan for its work that dovetails with the organization’s value-related expectations and goals. This, in turn, requires a full understanding of those expectations and goals that the in-house attorneys will be able to translate into actionable objectives and tasks.
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Walk the Walk: Paying More than Lip Service to Client Service
While every law firm highlights its client service on its website and in its marketing to prospective clients, all too often the practices followed by firms do not fully integrate the client’s expectations and value-related needs in the effort. Unless those firms address this dichotomy, those marketing efforts may fall flat, at least over the long term, as clients recognize the gap between promise and delivery.
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The Need to Secure Agreement with the Client about the Definition of Value
As in so many fields, the language used by lawyers to describe what they do matters. This is particularly so when those to whom the in-house lawyers report – often non-lawyer executives – think and speak with a focus on business issues and goals. Since lawyers discuss their work using a very specific jargon, this dichotomy can lead to unrecognized differences in their respective understandings. In order to reduce or eliminate the impact of those differences requires that the lawyers (since they are in the service end of the relationship and report to the executives) make concerted efforts to ensure a common understanding with corporate leaders as to how the legal function can best meet those leaders’ expectations and the organization’s needs.
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To Succeed, Don’t Just Focus on Clients: Understand Them and Their Preferences
Client service requires not only that counsel understand the client itself but, also, how that client wants to be served. The preferences and expectations of each client, if unmet, can lead to a barrier between counsel and client that will impede the former’s ability to serve the latter effectively and even, if unaddressed, sour the relationship between them.
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From AFAs and VBFs to VRQs and OOFs … Toward Fee Arrangements More Closely Calibrated to Value
Many lawyers, and certainly many or all corporate clients, decry the prevalence of time-based fees for legal service. Though we have heard about the evils of the hourly rate for decades, it still predominates in the area of legal billing. The means of breaking through the barriers to fee arrangements based on something other than time have arrived in the form of value-related qualities or VRQs.
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Using VRQs to Reach a Consensus with Your Client About Value
A consensus requires the use of a common language by the parties. Value-related qualities, or VRQs, can serve as the fulcrum with which to incorporate a client’s value proposition into the delivery of legal service to it.
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Without Effective Evaluation, All May Be for Naught
Service standards, common throughout the business in a wide range of contexts, depending on more than just the words in a standard. Their implementation can be clear or muddled, but in the long run, satisfying service standards require that the parties to the service agreement use a common language and tools that enhance their ability to share ideas and opinions about that service. Evaluation of the service, in turn, requires that they devote effort to periodic reviews with a lexicon specific to the need. Setting out the value-related expectations of the client represents the first step. Consistent application of those expectations in the context of those evaluations will serve the interests of both client and counsel.
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Reporting to Corporate Management on the Value of Legal Service
Corporate management often speaks a language different from that used by the company’s lawyers. That disparity can hinder the lawyers’ efforts to deliver the legal service that the organization’s leaders expect and want. Incorporating terms familiar to corporate executives that also “flesh out” how the lawyers’ service delivers value to the organization will serve the organization and the lawyers well.
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