As we consider things anew, we believe that our business of professional services has changed and the old ways won’t be coming back. The “great recession” (roughly the past 3-4 years) softened everything up and forced everyone to reassess how business is done, who we are best suited to serve, what new approaches can and should be taken. The internet continues to provide new channels for gathering and assessing information, making connections, identifying and capturing resources, doing business. These changes have been and continue to be very disruptive, but they also create tremendous opportunities. For our law firm and all service firms, we have to take a fresh approach. We look at every project, every client, every challenge, and consider it from new and different perspectives, looking for that intersection between the challenge or opportunity the client is dealing with, considering our experiences and drawing upon them in an effort to “cut to the chase” as to how the issue might turn out and how we might help the client navigate to the best result in the most efficient way possible. The ultimate challenge is to match the value we can provide with the pricing of our services, a true “win, win” for client and firm.

“Fresh approach” is our shorthand to emphasize our commitment to partnering with our clients to provide and receive value through new and innovative approaches. We take pride in thinking and acting differently while delivering high quality legal services and attracting talented professionals to our team. We left a well-established regional law firm to pursue our vision of partnering with clients to achieve great results at a reasonable cost. We believed that we did not have a choice other than to respond to the changed realities of the business world through our embrace of business innovation in the delivery and pricing of our services. Changing business dynamics pose challenges and create opportunities. Law firms and their clients must embrace business innovation as we find our places in a changed and changing world.

To us, “partnering” means finding win, win approaches that serve (and align) the interests of client and professional. It has meant moving away from universal reliance on “billing rates times billable hours” as the only basis for pricing and the traditional law firm’s myopic view of how to establish the “value” of services rendered. Rather than “selling our time,” and all that can imply, it is our view that we are joining our client’s team to contribute our expertise, our experience, our resources, and our judgment. We work hard to build relationships that encourage business clients to pick up the phone and consult us, allowing us to spot issues or put an issue in perspective in a manner that adds real business value. We do not want our clients to worry that they will be charged more just because they value our opinion and choose to consult us rather than winging it on their own. Instead, we want our clients to think of us less like a cost and more like the ideal legal department that is part of the business structure, knows their business, brings its training and experience to the mix, and helps achieve better business decisions that help the company succeed.

One of the “fresh” outcomes at our new firm, as we started charging some clients “monthly” instead of “hourly”, was a breakthrough with clients that had not considered us before while we swirled around in the maelstrom of “what is your billing rate?” and “how many hours will that project take” and “is this issue really that important?” This is just one example – in our context – where we came up with a solution from our own perception of what stops business people from hiring us or using us to our full “value add” potential.