John Chisholm’s Post

Reign Legal. Certainty.Consistency. Confidence. Yet another amazing and innovative law firm that does not bill by time. Led by the incomparable Melissa Buchanan

“Lawyers are the legal function’s greatest obstacle to demonstrating business value,” Mark A. Cohen In house lawyers might read this insightful and provocative Forbes article and find out why Mark believes this and what can be done to change it.

This morning someone kindly reminded me of this piece I wrote about #Oldlaw 5 years ago. I am so glad this is all irrelevant and outdated now in 2024 as #Oldlaw has changed so much since then. Do you agree...... or am I guilty of telling porky's too? 🙄

Love this quote from Thomas Bowden as he destroys the #Oldlaw "costs per hour" mantra. “So you take an arbitrary segment of your staff, assign them an arbitrary number of hours to record and/or work each year, then take an arbitrary portion of your overhead and add it to the salaries of the arbitrarily selected staff, add to that an arbitrary figure for your desired profit and divide by the arbitrarily chosen number of hours, and voila, that’s your ever so precisely determined “costs” per hour. Now measure your actual hours very precisely or all of those completely arbitrary choices will be completely useless. Of course, they’re useless anyway, because no matter how precisely you measure the wrong thing, it's still wrong.” 

If #Oldlaw/Biglaw partners owned restaurants and used the same business model as they do in their law firms. 😂 #billingbytime #timebilling #timedoesnotrelatetovalue

Was fun having this discussion with Law Subscribed guru Mathew Kerbis "Chisholm is critical of the legal profession's resistance to change, arguing that lawyers have “put the performance of an individual over the performance of a firm.” He sees subscription models as a way to return to a more holistic, “cradle to grave” relationship between lawyers and clients, providing ongoing value rather than just handling transactions. Overall, Chisholm advocates for lawyers to embrace new business models that prioritize outcomes over billable hours." Yep.

Another brilliant podcast by the godfather of value pricing Ron Baker. Nerds of Law® Warning: Don't listen to this podcast if you think you sell time or if you still think we live in the 20th century.

If you still think time based billing makes sense read this from Jonathan Stark "I cut it three times, and it's STILL too short!" 🤣❤️

"Everyone loves a bandwagon but nobody likes to bite the hand that feeds them." And so it seems to be the case with value based pricing in the legal profession at the moment. After several years of ridiculing anything like the notion of value based pricing, it is now so noticeable that some #Oldlaw/Biglaw firm external pricing consultants together with some #Oldlaw/Biglaw firms internal pricing/costing professionals are now espousing something akin to the concept of value pricing. Now I wonder why that might be? Could it be that some 20 years plus since Ron Baker & Paul Dunn first wrote Firm Of The Future, the penny has finally dropped and they now realise that time based billing is detrimental to both law firms and their clients, because among several other deleterious effects, it; focusses on time not value, rewards the slowest horse in the race, places all the risk on the clients, creates unwelcome "bill shock" for many clients, fosters a production mentality, encourages hoarding of hours, focuses on inputs, effort and activities instead of outcomes, outputs and results, is detrimental to the health and wellbeing of many members of our profession, encourages otherwise ethical lawyers to sometimes do unethical things, and places an artificial ceiling on any firm's potential income. Or is it simply because the specter of GenAI and other tech and automation tools has suddenly got them panicking about how their long time love for the "we sell time" billing model & time recording will be found wanting? Even then most of them still only pay lip service to value based pricing not wishing to bite the hand that feeds them and challenge their #Oldlaw client firms to ditch the billable hour completely. I get it. It is hard to say "I was wrong" but for so long as such #Oldlaw firms are encouraged to still record, measure & reward time they will remain stuck in their 20th century business model. If you are a law firm leader who genuinely wants to explore a better business and pricing model for your firm for all the right reasons perhaps consider those professionals who practice what they preach and walk the talk- like the team at Recalibrate Legal Operations.Reach out and chat to Elani Maas I think you will be pleased you did.

Yet another insightful and provocative post from Jordan Furlong that #Oldlaw firm leaders and their external advisers will ignore at their peril, instead preferring to focus on making incremental improvements to an outdated, flawed and dying business model. Again kudos to those courageous lawyers and professional leaders who have already made a paradigm shift to a far better way of practicing their craft for the benefit of themselves, their team, their clients and the future of the profession.