Saul Ewing Puts Fixed-Fee Options in Writing—on the Web
Law firms more and more are promoting that they offer alternative fee options for clients—something different from the traditional billable-hour model.
Now the mid-Atlantic firm Saul Ewing has stepped it up a notch, making its fixed-fee programs available for anyone to see, right on its website.
It’s a move that Altman Weil calls unique both because the firm went public with the program and because it’s focused on practices that are a good fit for alternative fee arrangements.
The Legal Intelligencer reports that this week, the firm posted its “Cost Certainty Commitment,” which outlines programs in which either clients can pay a fixed fee or pay by attorney per day.
“As a midsize firm, we felt like ‘shame on us’ if we can’t be very nimble in responding to this market activity,” the firm’s managing partner, David Antzis, is quoted saying. “We wanted to act quickly and with market specificity.”
In its online marketing statements on the program, Saul Ewing notes that the program is the result of client satisfaction surveys.
“Our Cost Certainty Commitment offers in-house counsel the peace of mind that their legal needs will be satisfied with measurable value: attorneys whose depth of experience avoids reinventing the wheel, instead making full use of existing work product and knowledge, and using agreed-upon cost structures intended to help project costs for budgeting purposes,” the firm pledges.
Antzis tells the Intelligencer that the firm hopes to make up any lost fees by increasing the firm’s volume of legal work. The firm has posted two types of arrangements for now—plans for due diligence work and for Pennsylvania insurance administrative hearings—and is calling on its partners to come up with more.
Firms have long talked about alternative fee arrangements to meet client demand for a move in this direction. Saul Ewing made the move, in part, because this time, clients seem particularly serious about it, Michael Consedine, the firm’s vice chairman of the insurance practice in Harrisburg tells the publication.
“It’s our sense that what we’re seeing right now in terms of the way companies are approaching legal services may be a real paradigm shift in terms of how the industry will work now and in the future,” Consedine says.
