Informed Pricing for More Accurate Legal Budgets

Have you ever renovated your house? The hosts on HGTV make the process look simple and painless when a single contractor spends no more than a few minutes looking at a home and spit out a clear estimate. The real deal is you approach a handful of contractors with good reputations and they follow up with their quotes. Their prices range substantially, their pricing models are all completely different, and it almost makes you wonder whether they’re just making up the prices as they go along. For decades, it seems like the personnel in charge of creating budgets for legal functions have been working under the same pretenses, seemingly pulling rates out of thin air. But now with a stronger grasp on industry prices and rates, the budgeting process can be streamlined substantially.  

This is not to say that we believe that all legal prices should be standardized on budgets. Just like any service, a price premium can be justified. Billing departments, pricing managers and now legal project managers have proven their worth through increasing firm profitability year over year. But for a long time, they have relied on spreadsheets, calculators and their working knowledge of the industry to guide them. With technology tools that aid in more informed decision making, those personnel can execute their budgets efficiently and with more certainty.

Legal Decoder’s Pricing Decoder leverages everything and the kitchen sink from pricing data. It recognizes the details and nuances that differentiate similar matters and also can read between the lines to report on which points in a firm’s budget can lead them to greater savings. While working with our clients, we have learned some key lessons on how to approach legal budgets, and we think that experience guides how our technology recognizes patterns.

Any firm that is bidding for business relies on budgets to be accurate. Corporate legal teams are adopting the tools and learning quickly how to better assess their outside counsel. If firms don’t support their pricing teams with the best tools and knowledge available, they may find themselves getting suckered in by the HGTV fantasy.