Every year law firms come to their clients with annual rate hikes. There's no avoiding it.
What happens next is a series of paralyzing events for corporate legal departments. It's not just the sticker price of a rate increase that hurts.
It's trying to organize all of the proposed timekeeper increases across any single firm, manually calculate the cost impact to the business, and figure out where to spend the most time negotiating.
Multiply that process by tens, dozens, or sometimes a hundred firms. Now that's pain 😱.
Which is why we're excited to launch a new product to solve this entire process end-to-end: Rate Review Pro.
Rate Review Pro gives in-house teams the ability to capture, compare, and negotiate rates in one single place. No spreadsheets. No email threads.
One unified system.
Here's why we built it.
Expanding PERSUIT's vision for corporate legal departments
PERSUIT's mission has always been to help corporate legal departments streamline their outside counsel management by moving towards value-based pricing, outcomes, and results.
In doing so, the PERSUIT platform has evolved from traditionally supporting legal teams with alternative fee arrangements (AFAs), to developing a variety of use cases that support legal operations, including:
- Single or portfolio matter RFPs
- Panel management
- Secondments
- Negotiating an AFA on an existing matter
- RFIs
"Annual rate negotiations" consistently tops the list of pain points for corporate legal teams that we talk with. It's costly both in terms of time and dollars spent.
And yet, not a single product today is specifically designed to help legal teams take control of this process at scale.
We know this is true because legal teams are still using spreadsheets — not software — to manage it! In our recent webinar on rate negotiations tactics, we found that 90% of legal teams are still using Excel and email to run rate reviews... 😩.
Since timekeeper rates are often the baseline for calculating any AFA, giving our customers a seamless way to control and manage annual rate hikes was a natural next step with our vision.
With that, let’s take a look at what’s possible with Rate Review Pro.
How it works
Managing law firm rates through Rate Review Pro is simple. Here are the four key components:
1. Send out one request to all of your firms
Yes. That's it.
Using our pre-built template for capturing rates, you'll simply define what timekeeper rate cards you'd like firms to provide.
Work with a firm in different jurisdictions with different rates? No problem. Just add it to your summary upfront and firms will know to create multiple cards.
When you're ready to go, add any firm contacts you want and hit send. Done.
Firms will receive an invite to provide rate information directly through PERSUIT. Even better, the rate cards are already made for them to plug and play their proposed rates. They can add or remove timekeepers and create rate cards for different regions.
When they're all set, they'll submit back to you.
2. All of your firms’ proposed rates come back in an organized view
Think about in the past where you were gathering rate increases from firms in one-off emails. You'd then compile them one by one into a spreadsheet.
Those days are over.
With Rate Review Pro, all rate cards submitted by firms will come back in one view. A single table where you can compare all of your firms' proposed rate increases.
3. Quickly visualize and understand the most impactful hikes
Rate Review Pro then automatically calculates critical metrics for you, like weighted average increase and total spend impact, as shown below.
When your firms submit last year's hours along with their rates, you'll quickly know the true cost impact of an increase.
For instance, a partner increase of 6% at one firm that worked 800 hours last year is a lot more expensive than a partner increase of 10% at another firm who worked 15 hours. Know immediately where to focus your time negotiating.
4. Negotiate with ease
Lastly, you can click into any firm's rate cards and negotiate directly there. No email threads. No lost data.
Simply redline directly on the rate card and submit your reasons for your counter-proposal.
With other firms' rates hosted in one spot, you can easily filter and point to real data on other similarly ranked firm proposals. Use their data as a baseline for negotiations.
If you’re new to PERSUIT and you’d like to see Rate Review Pro in action, schedule some time with us here.