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Hype or Help? How Can Alternative Fee Arrangements Add Demonstrable Value to Your Practice and Your Clients?

Recorded on: Jun. 20, 2012
Running Time: 01:07:35

Taken from the briefing Hype or Help? How Can Alternative Fee Arrangements Add Demonstrable Value to Your Practice and Your Clients? recorded June 2012.

The discussion of AFA's (aka alternative fee arrangements or value-based fees), is no longer a discussion of "alternatives" as much as it is a discussion of "appropriate" fee arrangements: namely, legal pricing and cost models that focus on finding and focusing on the value of legal work, rather than simply multiplying hours X rates.  There are some who'd even go so far as to suggest that AFA's are nothing more than a reflection of a good, "sticky" budget with a well-scoped project plan.  Where are you in thinking about or adapting to this major shift in the business model of pricing, staffing, and delivering value-based legal work?  Given that there is no "one-size-fits-all" prescription for fee models; given that many lawyers are risk-averse when it comes to adopting progressive business models; and given that there is still a significant amount of skepticism or reticence to leave well-understood hourly models behind (in both client law departments and law firms), how will you make sense of all these varied options and figure out what's right for you, your firm, and your clients?

In this introductory-level session, Susan J. Hackett of Legal Executive Leadership, LLC (former SVP & GC of the Association of Corporate Counsel - ACC) will help you examine the options for moving from theory to practice in implementing AFAs.  She will help you - even if you are not expert (yet!) - to understand how recognized leaders implementing AFAs assess which kinds of options are right for a variety of practices, benchmark how non–hourly fee options have worked in other firms and for clients, as well as begin to think about the kinds of practical steps (and the variety of scaled efforts) you can take to get started.  Susan's experience in offering this overview stems from her widely–recognized leadership in bringing together hundreds of firms and thousands of clients to collaborate on the first major professional project to reconnect the cost of legal services with the value of the work provided: the ACC Value Challenge.  She's addressed hundreds of audiences on this topic, and developed some of the ground-breaking resources that have transformed firm and department processes and practices to focus on new ways to price legal work.

Lecture Topics  [Total Time: 01:07:35]

  • Understand how greater facility with a wider variety of legal pricing/fee mechanisms provides your law department or law firm with a strategic advantage and a more distinguishable value proposition
  • Learn the basics of different kinds of fee structures, and how they are used by a variety of clients and firms to drive value and greater collaboration in their relationships
  • Re-align the important connections between pricing and your practice expertise, your internal staffing models, the processes you deploy to improve the efficient delivery of more consistent results, and your ability to manage projects better
  • Examine how clients and firms that don't enjoy Fortune 100 / AmLaw 100 status are nonetheless leveraging the value of their work through AFAs
  • Consider how you can re-tool your personal service model to focus on providing valued results, rather than a stack of hours
  • Think about adopting metrics, driving comparative assessments, and caching improved data which flow from your new pricing models, and how this kind of knowledge can improve your firm or department's internal and external evaluation process

Presentation Material

  • Hype or Help? How Can Alternative Fee Arrangements Add Demonstrable Value to Your Practice and Your Clients? - Legal Executive Leadership
    Susan J. Hackett
  • Hype or Help? How Can Alternative Fee Arrangements Add Demonstrable Value to Your Practice and Your Clients?
    Susan J. Hackett
Speaker(s)
Susan J. Hackett ~ Legal Executive Leadership, LLC

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