Alternative Fees & Value Based Billing

Increase the value delivered on your outside counsel engagements. By implementing effective approaches – whether alternative fees or improved hourly rate models — CMG can help you realize savings, increase cost predictability, and achieve greater alignment between client and law firm.

How do we do this? By bringing better tools, data analysis and management processes to support your teams in creating and managing more effective outside counsel fee structures. Using our proprietary, AFADATA^® system, we will help scope your outside counsel projects more effectively, up-front (either at the outset of a new matter, or at the beginning of a new budget year.)

Our analytics and experienced team will help confirm that outside counsel’s plans and budgets are aligned with your in-house views regarding scope and complexity of the matter, along with corresponding resources to be allocated and fees to be paid. This way, efforts and fees are better aligned with your strategy, to create a higher likelihood of success and reduce the amount of low value work performed. These benefits hold true whether you and teams prefer to continue with hourly rate billing, or opt to select one of the value-based fees options identified (e.g. fixed fees, outcome-driven fees based on achieving success etc.)

Through our detailed analysis of your historical spending data, we will highlight spending patterns that are consistent with amounts historically paid, and identify high outliers that can be trimmed to increase efficiency. (We can help with this whether you have an e-billing system or not.)

Using our AFADATA^® templates and quarterly updates, we will enable your teams to see how actual matter scope and activity are progressing vs. assumptions and budgeted dollars. This will help identify opportunities to strategically reduce budgets as the year progresses, either to increase savings or fund other matters that may be exceeding budget because scope and activity have increased. All of this leads to better cost management and higher levels of predictability across the portfolio.

And at the end of the year, our team will help you by providing law firm scorecards to track how your firms performed according to key financial measures like performance vs. budget, quality of forecasting, timelines of budget submission etc. Increasingly, companies are finding these helpful either as internal barometers of law firm financial performance, or as dashboards to be strategically shared with law firms to help evaluate and improve performance.

In the end, by using the AFADATA^® approach to value-based fees and budgeting, in-house teams deliver measurable savings back to the business, and have a strong business case to answer the questions – what should this work cost, and how do we know this particular budget is sound?