http://denniskennedy.com/blog/2006/06/using-technology-to-increase-profitability-moving-into-alternative-billing-via-technology-article/ Legal technology, technology law and other musings. Tue, 19 Feb 2013 04:08:56 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 http://denniskennedy.com/blog/2006/06/using-technology-to-increase-profitability-moving-into-alternative-billing-via-technology-article/comment-page-1/#comment-126 David J. French Wed, 28 Jun 2006 19:29:30 +0000 http://denniskennedy_com.innosoftware.net/?p=1090#comment-126 David French writes:
I recently encountered a file which I took over in mid-prosecution. So far we have filed two RCE’s. Based on time logged, the client has been billed several tens of thousands of dollars. The file is important, but the client is bitter; he wants a discount.
Meanwhile, I have other files where matters are handled on a perfunctory basis at highly competitive prices and I do not wish to implement a discount policy with respect to those files.
I’m toying with the following formula: after the first $5,000 of billings the next $5,000 of billings will receive a 5% discount and as cumulative billings accrue in $5,000 increments, this policy will be repeated until the client has been billed $30,000, the last $5,000 of which will be subject to a 25% discount. At that point, the discount rate could stop increasing, or could mount further to 30% or even 40%. In all events, when the bill gets large, the client eventually gets a significant discount.
I’d like to know whether anyone else thinks that this is a rational formula for addressing the special case where time spent on a file balloons out of all proportion to anybody’s expectation.

]]> http://denniskennedy.com/blog/2006/06/using-technology-to-increase-profitability-moving-into-alternative-billing-via-technology-article/comment-page-1/#comment-125 Kreig Fri, 23 Jun 2006 19:16:31 +0000 http://denniskennedy_com.innosoftware.net/?p=1090#comment-125 Dennis, excellent article. Becoming more efficient and thereby reducing the costs to clients is a good thing, but I would suggest that is just a part of the billable hour puzzle. Another part is using legal techology is to cut down on non-billable hours, as non-billables can really hurt law firm revenues.
In my practice, I have found that legal marketing and business development is my largest outlay of non-billables (and expense). This is where I really think that legal techology can help out the most — even if I continue to operate on an hourly billing model.
If legal techology were able to feed me cases wihtout my having to do any prospecting, I could simply sit back and focus on providing legal services to clients (and billing for it) rather than worrying about whether clients would be coming in the door next month or the month after that and spending a lot of time developing my legal network.

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