Are Billing Rate Increases Hurting Your Law Firm?

Are there rough waters ahead for Big Law?

Since 2018, ever increasing billing rates, across both partner and associate levels have caused a major paradigm shift within law spending. This has caused many in-house teams to seriously reconsider their outside legal spend ratios as reported by Dan Roe, in his recent article “Upticks In Partner Billing, Associate Rates Prompt Shift To ALSPs”.

In this blog we are going to speak about:

1 – What is the reason behind the shift over to ALSPs?

2 – How can legal Rev Ops help?

3 – How can Nexl help your law firm get more out of their relationships?

What is the reason behind the shift over to ALSPs?

“Legal service purchasers” aka in-house and corporate legal departments are increasingly, moving to Alternative Legal Service Providers otherwise known as ALSPs. Whilst there are other contributing factors to the move – such as business scales and outsourcing habits – the message from purchasers is crystal clear: If Big Law has any plans to stay ahead and not let non-traditional competition over-take, they need to get on track by investing more into their own ALSP models, and they need to operationalize their go-to-market strategies.

The latest report from Wolters Kluwer LegalView Insights confirms that Big Law’s moment of fame is not going to last forever, especially if it’s built on ever-increasing rate hikes.

How can legal Rev Ops help?

Revenue Operations is a new way to manage your law firm, that allows you to get much more revenue out of the same amount of work, by operationalizing your go-to-market motions. If law firms simply start by aligning their marketing, business development, and/or client service team, they can begin to produce better margins, by maximising the type of revenue they are getting across their clients.  

If law firms successfully operationalise their go-to-market strategies, they won’t have to depend on continuously increasing their billing rates. Law firms will be able to receive more profit from the clients they already have by retaining them and predictably expanding them.  

How can Nexl help your law firm get more out of their relationships?

Nexl is a three-part system: No-data-entry CRM, Relationship Intelligence/ERM and Revenue Operations Platform. With our no-data-entry CRM, Nexl automatically captures all of your lawyers’ interactions. Any email sent or received and any meetings with clients, prospective clients or referral sources are automatically captured, analysed and, seamlessly, turned into actionable insights to help you accelerate your revenue growth. Your lawyers do not need to input data into the system making Nexl a true no-data-entry system.  Through the use of Nexl, your law firm will be more aligned thus increasing revenue from the same amount or less work.

If you would like to learn more about Nexl Revenue Operations Cloud and how Nexl is helping law firms leverage revenue operations to create healthier profit margins (without increasing rates), then click here to learn more about the Revenue Operations movement here or reach out for a demo by clicking on “Request Demo” below.

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