What value can First Law add?

Added Thursday 22nd October 2009

All clients seek best value from their lawyers. However, research by us and senior in-house counsel over the last ten years has identified a number of restrictive and out dated practices by the legal profession that make it difficult for clients to demonstrate they are achieving best value. The reasons for conducting a competitive tender for legal services are therefore:

• To enable clients to make informed decisions on the most suitable lawyers to instruct, by creating a robust audit trail of the tender process

• To afford clients consistent levels of service delivery through a uniform service level agreement

• To allow clients to budget for legal services precisely, by introducing disciplined procedures to estimate and calculate fees

• To reduce future expenditure on legal services, with no loss of quality in service standards

The central issue we address in our tenders is to create transparency over the way lawyers estimate and calculate fees, so that clients can budget for their legal services. In consultation with many in-house legal departments, we have undertaken detailed analyses of historic expenditure, in terms of work type, frequency and volumes, to create detailed fees matrices with weighted scoring applied to the most common kinds of instructions. Lawyers have to submit pricing information in conformity with the matrix, using fixed fees in place of hourly rates. Exact like-for-like price comparisons of competing providers can then be undertaken, meaning that value for money can be measured much more easily and accurately than has ever been possible in the past.

Fees always calculated as a fraction of projected savings.