Law firm clients are becoming increasingly cost conscious, leading to increased demand for pricing, transparency, flexibility and better communication throughout the matter lifecycle. A recent survey revealed that 30% of firms have seen increased demand for matter budgets in the last 12 months.  Firms that fail to prioritize internal pricing expertise and technologies to help build accurate matter budgets risk damaging the client relationship and falling behind the competition.     

Here’s how building accurate, trackable matter budgets can help you drive value and profits:  

1. Providing detailed resource plans for your client matters:
   One of the main reasons why clients delay payment or ask for discounts is because firms are failing to provide accurate resource plans prior to starting the piece of legal work. Creating resource plans with scenario planning will help firms create profitability projections. 
   
   
2. Reduce discounting and write-offs:
   Discounting and writing-off is causing mass profit leakage for firms. With 25% of firms admitting to poor scooping of firms who are still experiencing profit leakage, discounting and writing off work causes major setback in firm profits. 
   
   
3. Using historic data to build accurate budgets help in creating informed pricing strategies:
   With myriad of data at your disposal, leveraging data to inform future budgets builds on the firm's expertise, create cost effect resource plans and select fee arrangements to predict the most profitable price. 
   
   

Here’s what pricing experts are saying: 

• Challenges Facing Commercial Finance and Pricing Experts 
• The Legal Pricing Divide: Embracing Financial Transparency to Master Legal Services Pricing 
• How Firms Navigating Economic Downturns Maintain Profitability 
• Navigating Rate Trends for 2024: Strategies for Pricing Success 
  
  

So how can you build transparent relationships with your clients?

BigHand Matter Pricing AI-enabled matter budgeting, pricing and tracking tool designed for law firms to manage their matters financially.  The PMS-integrated solution supports pricing teams and lawyers to achieve better financial outcomes through data-driven budgets and costs, better resource plans, lower write-offs and clear client reporting.

Big Benefits

• Price for profitability 
• AI-enabled timecard analysis 
• Create budgets, top-down or bottom-up 
• Track and manage budgets against actuals 
• Analyse, and clone past matters for more accurate budgets  
• Apply what-ifs to compare budget scenarios   
• Keep clients updated with budget reports