Legal expert systems pioneer, Neota Logic, has teamed up with pricing groups Burcher Jennings and Validatum to launch a new legal pricing tool, to be called Virtual Pricing Director.
It joins an ever-expanding market for using legal data analytics to predict and model costs as well as time and resources used in legal work.
The companies said that: ‘The platform will offer intelligent templates that incorporate an array of practice areas, tasks, rates and clauses, and produces an automated pricing dashboard that presents clients and law firms with a clear breakdown of expected spending, offering unprecedented accuracy and transparency in the legal pricing process for clients, while saving time and money for firms.’
Richard Burcher, co-founder of the Virtual Pricing Director and Validatum, said: ‘Market pressures and regulatory requirements are fuelling an inevitable drive towards greater price efficiency across the legal sector.’
‘Virtual Pricing Director enables fee earners at all levels to generate high quality and accurate pricing proposals in a fraction of the time that it currently takes,’ he added.
Rick Seabrook, an executive leader at Neota Logic, said: ‘At the press of a button, Virtual Pricing Director will give users a complete pricing summary, outlining not only the fees options but also an explanation of how they are calculated, making it easy for the client to select the right option for them.’
‘One more click and it will be automatically emailed to the client, and put on your client file. All of this takes you somewhere between 3 to 5 minutes depending upon how complex the matter might be,’ he concluded.
The old adage “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” comes to mind. Pricing is not really that simplistic. In reality, lawyers have become quite good at pulling figures out of the air and getting a price that clients will say okay to; unfortunately, the far bigger challenge is understanding how to deliver work to that price – or if doing so is even profitable for the firm. This requires a much larger answer to address the challenge.