As politicians ponder the consequences of rapidly rising prices and how best to manage the global challenges, consumers are advised to fix their energy prices quickly!
Law firms are already very familiar with the concept of fixed-fees. For years, they have been forced to respond to clients’ increasing demands for certainty and transparency of pricing by moving away from the traditional time-billing model and offering fixed-fees for services. This has extended not just to easily commoditised services such as conveyancing and willsbut right across the spectrum of legal services, including less predictable transactional work and litigation.
The growth of fixed-fees
It’s easy to understand why clients prefer this method of pricing. If charged an hourly rate, the client carries much of the financial risk and could face a final bill which is far higher than originally estimated. Rightly or wrongly, clients often believe that this makes lawyers complacent with little incentive to work efficiently or seek new, cost-effective ways of doing things.
Conversely, if a lawyer provides a fixed-fee, much of the financial risk passes to the law firm and the client has certainty from the outset, knowing that the costs of any unforeseen work (assuming this is still within the original scope of the retainer) will be absorbed by the firm. Indeed, given the uncertainty inherent in certain areas of law, such as litigation, it is ever more crucial that law firms manage their projects as efficiently as possible.
The direction of travel in the marketplace means that resisting clients’ clamour for fixed fee arrangements is not an option for law firms. In-house teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend and are unsentimental about switching supplier in the search for value. In order to thrive in this environment, law firms will need to price fixed-fees accurately and find innovative ways of doing the work as effectively as possible so that profit margins can be preserved, or even improved.
How can Global BPO help?
At Global BPO we deliver a range of legal process services, tailored to the individual needs of our clients. We provide teams of skilled personnel who work as an extension of the client’s in-house team to carry out labour-intensive jobs such as document review and bundle preparation. All of Global BPO’s legal process services can be provided on a fixed fee basis, enabling law firms to have certainty as to what they will be charged and to pass on that certainty to their clients. Using any of Global BPO’s services has the added benefit of reducing costs for our clients by between 40% and 60%, without compromising on quality and speed of service. We also utilise specialist document review software to create significant efficiencies for due diligence, eDiscovery and data subject access requests (DSAR).
Why would a law firm want to charge its clients less?
All businesses benefit from building on-going relationships and securing repeat workfrom existing clients on a long-term basis.
By facilitating fixed-fee arrangements, law firms are providing their clients with the cost certainty and value they demand. Usually, this generates goodwill and leads to new instructions.
At the same time, law firms are concerned to ensure they maintain profitability when offering fixed-fees. Reducing internal costs for high volume or labour-intensive work, whilst maintaining quality, enables law firms to offer a competitive (but profitable) rate in an ever more competitive market place.
Additionally, within the constraints of a fixed-fee, firms have more scope to add value with highly skilled, specialist input from their own lawyers, cementing goodwill further whilst preserving their own profit margin.
Get in touch
For a no obligation chat about how Global BPO can help your firm profit from fixed-fee work contact: info@globalbpo.co.uk
