Ask any private-practice lawyer and they will tell you that clients frequently aggravate their costs through their own conduct. The result is costs that are higher than they could have been, a disgruntled client and almost inevitably, some sort of write-off...

More and more law firms have acquired additional pricing and price negotiation skills or brought in external pricing professionals to participate in the negotiation process. They have also become considerably more rigorous about whether to throw their hat in the ring...

We hope that the following synopsis of some of the most popular and widely republished of our 2014 law firm pricing blogs will provide you with some inspiration and guidance as you perhaps ponder what your firms' approach to pricing will be over the next 12 months....

Pam Waldow is a Partner and GC at legal consultancy, Edge International in the US. Pam writes great articles, the latest of which I thoroughly commend – Straight From The Horse’s Mouth: GCs Say What They Want From Outside Firms. I agree with all of it except one of the comments made by...

Health Warning: This is a good-natured satirical critique of legal procurement professionals. If you are thin skinned, don’t read it (so now of course you will). Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. Heed the wisdom of the ages...

When we work intensively with firms on pricing, a common grizzle is the firms’ frustration with what they characterise as the lack of sophistication with which the ‘procurement’ exercise is run. Non-lawyers often approach the procurement of even sophisticated...

The pricing function in many law firms is something of an orphan. No-one knows who it belongs to so it ends up belonging to no-one. Individual department heads and fee earners make decisions on the fly with little regard to the firms’ pricing policies...

The first article in this two-part series looked at some of the underlying structural issues impacting the approach taken by international law firms to the setting of prices in diverse geographical locations. It also identified the increasing propensity...

In-house legal teams are under financial pressure. We all know this. In some cases their budgets are relatively static but they want more for the same amount. In other cases the budget has been reduced so they want...

A common feature of international law firms is a dissonance between the firm’s organisational and operational structures ... internecine price competition and clients feeding on the carcass of a firm with no clear cross-border pricing strategy...

With the economy on the upswing, many lawyers are contemplating increasing prices. In many instances, firms and Chambers have held their rates as much as possible and many will not have been able to implement much if any increase over the last...

The refrain; "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there", is essentially a paraphrase of an exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll's ‘Alice in Wonderland’. Unfortunately, there are some strong parallels between....