A recent Law.com by Andrew Maloney, “Where Are Partner Billing Rates Surging the Most in Big Law,” reports that, while partner billing rates rose last year all over, they skyrocketed in certain practice areas in Big Law and several U.S. cities, according to a new analysis.  Going forward, billing rates are expected to continue another steep increase this year.  Partner billing rates surged to record levels last year “in all tiers of law firms and in all practice areas,” but it was high-dollar practices that commanded some of the largest rate increases, with mergers and acquisitions, commercial and contracts, and corporate practices leading the way, according to the latest trends report from LexisNexis CounselLink.

Hourly rates for all partners jumped between 2021 and 2022 by 4.5%. That’s higher than the increases in 2020 (3.5%) and 2021 (3.4%), and the highest since CounselLink first began producing the trends report in 2013.  The median hourly rate for partners in M&A shot up much more, with a 6.4% jump between 2021 and 2022.  Commercial and contracts, corporate, and labor and employment practices also notched significant rate increases, growing 5.8%, 5.6% and 5.6%, respectively, last year.

With the exception of labor and employment, the median hourly rates charged by partners in each of those practices was $675 or more, according to CounselLink.  The median rate for M&A partners was $955, the highest rate of any practice area in the report.  For commercial and contracts, it was $706. And for corporate work, it was $675.  The median hourly rate for partners in labor and employment was $530.  The trends report is based on $52 billion in legal spending across 420,000 timekeepers and 1.4 million legal matters.

Kris Satkunas, director of strategic consulting for CounselLink, noted that partner rates were on pace to rise 5.4% in 2023, even higher than last year’s record growth.  “There’s still a lot of work to be done in 2023 that has yet to be billed.  So, could that change?  Yes, of course,” she said.  “But we’re on this trajectory right now, and my gut feeling is that it probably won’t go down.  It may go up even a little bit.”

While the 2022 rate growth happened in a year of slower demand, she said she’s not convinced there’s a correlation between rate growth and demand at the practice level.  More often, she said, it’s a firm-wide decision.  She noted that M&A rates, for instance, were still growing at a decent clip a couple of years ago when the practice area was as busy as ever.  In 2022, as demand faltered, the rates grew more than ever.  Analysts told Law.com that partner billing rates rose partly because law firms were feeling the effects of inflation and trying to maintain profitability as demand took a hit.

Rates are higher for practices such as M&A partly because that work is more often done by the larger, more expensive firms, Satkunas said.  “These are kind of the big, high-risk, bet-the-farm sort of matters, and those corporate counsel want to go to the firms they have the most faith in, and those tend to be the larger firms,” she said.  Indeed, the trends report noted that in 2022, the “Largest 50″ firms handled 68% of M&A work. “With regard to the other high rate practices of regulatory & compliance, commercial & contracts and corporate, the ‘Largest 50′ firms had 57 percent of the work from these practices,” the authors wrote.

Overall, the largest firms increased market share, the report noted, with their largest gains in regulatory and compliance, corporate and real estate work.  But head count size didn’t always determine the largest rate increases.  In 2022, the median rate at firms with 501-750 lawyers grew by 9%, but only 3% for the largest firms, the report said.

Rates by City

The report also noted many of the largest legal markets saw the biggest jumps in rates.  Six major metropolitan areas saw median partner rate growth climb higher than 5%: Washington, D.C. (a 6.6% jump, to $925 per hour), Chicago (5.8%, to $765 per hour), Los Angeles (5.7%, to $795 per hour), New York (5.5%, to $975 per hour), San Francisco (5.5%, to $608 per hour) and Seattle (5.1%, to $780 per hour).

“On the opposite side of the spectrum, two cities saw hourly growth rate below 2 percent: Dallas and Detroit,” the report noted.  Utah led the way in terms of partner billing rate growth among states, with the median rate climbing 6.2% in 2022, up to about $350 per hour.

Satkunas said some of the growth among cities and states is a reflection of the size of law firms there. Dallas and Detroit have some large firms, but also plenty of midsize and smaller firms that didn’t raise rates quite as much.  Law firm partners in Utah had more double-digit increases than partners in other states, she noted. Utah just has a smaller population of law firm partners than most states and is thus more susceptible to outliers.

A recent Law.com by Maria Dinzeo, “Law Firm Partner Hourly Rates Rose Last Year at Biggest Clip in at Least a Decade,” reports that hourly rates for law firm partners jumped 4.5% in 2022, driven in part by law firms’ fears of profitability losses from inflation and a drop in M&A activity, according to a report from LexisNexis CounselLink.  The report, based on $52 billion in legal spending across 420,000 timekeepers and 1.4 million legal matters, says that annual percentage increase was the largest since CounselLink put out its first report in 2013.

The largest portion of corporate spending went to partners at the 50 largest firms, those with 750 lawyers or more, where the average partner billed at a 46% higher rate than the next tier of firms with 501-750 lawyers.  The 50 largest law firms also saw their market share swell to 47.3%, particularly in regulatory and compliance, mergers and acquisitions and financial matters, where the 50 largest firms consumed 55% of legal billing in 2022.

“There’s all this increased regulatory pressure going on out there.  And who do you want to handle this stuff?  You’re gonna go to the firms that you think had the most insight into this and that’s going to be the big firms,” said report author Kris Satkunas, director of strategic consulting for CounselLink.  She also recently took a preliminary peak at this year’s numbers, and partner rates are on track to rise 5.4%, an even bigger increase than the 2022 record.  Those rates rose 3.4% in 2021 and 3.5% in 2020.

“It’s a very big leap compared to where we have been running for the last 10 years.  But that number will change.  Will it go up or down?  I don’t know,” she said.  “But that’s where things stand today through the first four months of the year.”  Satkunas noted that 25% of partners had increases of over 10% last year.  She said some legal departments also reported seeing double-digit rate increases.  The hikes could be attributed to firms beginning to feel the effects of inflation and less demand for certain types of work.  “I think there’s some fear about being able to hit profitability,” she said.

M&A activity also declined in 2022 after hitting an all-time high in 2020, experts say, when high demand for M&A work, with accompanying litigation, tax, real estate and intellectual property issues, gave firms more work than they could handle.  “M&A was the gift that kept on giving in 2020 and 2021,” said law firm consultant Kent Zimmermann of the Zeughauser Group.  “The massive demand for talent led to a big rate increase and that caused some firms to pull away a lot relative to their peers on profitability and talent advantage.”  Even though M&A work has slowed, Zimmermann said firms are still vying to attract the “best” lawyers as a path toward profitability.

“Even though demand is soft, that rate lever is still important,” he said.  “If there is any recession, it’s looking like it’s going to be short and shallow, so law firms are thinking.  We need to plan two to four years ahead.  We can’t under-do it on the rate increases.  It’s a big driver of our ability to enhance profitability and compete and attract the best lawyers.”

Some firms raised rates twice over the span of 12 months to keep up.  “The internal messaging was we need to pay to be competitive in the market for associates and their pay is going up,” Zimmermann said.  “You need the best and brightest associates and this is what it takes.”

If law firms have only two levers to profitability- raising rates or drumming up more work— raising rates is the easier of the two, Satkunas said.  “Typically, they are more comfortable raising rates.  It’s actually easier to raise rates and go find new customers or find new new work,” she said.  Though alternative-fee arrangements have grown more popular in recent years, this year’s report notes that their adoption remains largely unchanged, and represented 6.3% of total legal billings in 2022, according to the CounselLink report.

“At the end of the day, I believe that most corporate counsel are just more comfortable negotiating an hourly rate discount than being creative.  It’s easier to negotiate a rate than it is to have to think about, what’s the value of this matter, what am I willing to pay for the outcome I want?” Satkunas said.  “I’m disappointed and I really would love to see a real meaningful uptick in the use of AFA’s but it just hasn’t happened.”

A recent Law 360 story by Aebra Coe, “Law Firm Billing Tips For Avoiding An Irate Client,” reports that a recent lawsuit filed against K&L Gates LLP by a client unhappy with a legal bill highlights some common pitfalls that law firms face when it comes to billing practices, but there are ways to avoid a similar situation, experts say.  The lawsuit against K&L Gates, which was filed in August by Chicora Life Center LC, accuses the firm of using several tactics to increase its bill for representing the bankrupt medical center in a Chapter 11 proceeding over a lease termination dispute.

Some of the alleged billing practices are not entirely uncommon among law firms, according to two experts who declined to comment directly on the lawsuit but provided their thoughts on client billing more generally.  The alleged practices include "block billing," where a lawyer "blocks" together a number of tasks over a set amount of hours; "hoarding," when an overqualified lawyer with a high billing rate retains work rather than passing it on to someone with a lower billing rate; and "multibilling," which occurs when multiple attorneys are tasked with performing the same work.

"All of those things mentioned have been going on for years and years.  This is not at all new," said James Wilbur, an expert on law firm billing at consulting firm Altman Weil Inc.  Regardless of how the K&L Gates suit shakes out in court, other law firms are likely looking for ways to avoid being in a similar position.  While such situations are not entirely preventable because clients can sometimes file bad-faith suits, there are steps firms can take to ensure clients are as happy as possible with a bill at the conclusion of a matter, Wilbur said.

He suggested firms rely on three things to accomplish this: technology, training and collaboration.  E-billing software can often catch double billing and block billing, he said, as well as phrases that might irk a client, like "reviewed phone notes," that may not indicate that the time spent added any value to the matter.

And that leads to training, which should be conducted at all levels on a regular basis so that any attorney or paralegal who puts together a bill is aware of best practices and is skilled in conveying the value brought to the client via the time the individual spent working, he said.  Senior attorneys billing for work that could be done by someone more junior is another beast, Wilbur said, and one that law firm management must work to dissuade by encouraging collaboration and the sharing of work.

Clients have many different rules when it comes to fees, but "no surprises" is a big one, said Toby Brown, chief practice management officer at Perkins Coie LLP.  "The bottom-line answer is more transparency.  And more real-time updates about what's going on," Brown said.  "The lawyers are uncomfortable talking about these things, and so they don't talk about them head-on."

He said lawyers and clients can often get wrapped up in the legal issues at hand, with fee issues taking a back seat.  For example, if the volume of discovery in a major case increases substantially, a conversation on cost might not always occur, but it should, he said.  Real-time sharing of information on the cost of a matter is vital, Brown said.  He said his firm has worked to incorporate the help of its project management team to flag when the scope of a matter has changed so that the attorney on the matter is aware a conversation is needed.

The firm has also implemented technology that goes beyond basic e-billing software to allow attorneys to better monitor their budget on a matter, he said.  Ultimately, according to Wilbur, having a strong relationship with a client to begin with will go a long way.

"Even in a firm that's highly ethical and has training around these issues, mistakes are going to happen. Something is going to creep through," he said.  "The first thing is you have to have a good enough relationship with the client so they know they can text or email you, pick up the phone and point out a problem in the bill, and you will deal with it without arguing."

When contacted by Law360 for comment about its case, K&L Gates described Chicora's claims as "a transparent attempt to re-litigate issues that were raised and rejected years ago through final orders in a concluded bankruptcy."  A third-party fee examiner, it said, expressly found that the fees requested by the firm were reasonable and should be recoverable, and then the bankruptcy court adopted that determination.  "We are confident the present claims also will be rejected," the firm said.

A recent Law.com article by Nathan Wenzel of SimpleLegal Inc., “5 Cost-Cutting Strategies For Corporate Legal Department,” reports on legal cost measures for corporate legal departments.  This article was posted with permission.  The article reads:

Corporate legal departments have long been focused on reducing legal spending.  The emphasis on cost-cutting has only increased in 2020 as the economic uncertainties of the pandemic have caused companies to scrutinize expenses across the board.

According to a recent report from the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, 61 cents of every dollar spent on legal costs in 2020 goes to external legal costs — a 15-cent increase from 2018.  This uptick, combined with the year's novel challenges, has many legal departments looking for new ways to control legal expenses beyond reviewing line items, which has proven to be ineffective for many companies.

While there's been a lot of chatter in the industry about the need to switch to fixed fees or alternative fee arrangements to reduce costs, these shifts have been slow to take hold.  They're also difficult to measure if we retain a focus on the billable hour.

When clients ask firms for fixed fees but also request the hours worked so they "know that the fixed fee was the right price," then we haven't really made the change to fixed fees.  It is a difficult transition and one that will take time.  We should always push toward better alignment of price and value, but we need to balance near-term realities with long-term goals.

In the near term, we need to control costs — even if that only means focusing on hourly rates.  In the long term, we need to align the work to the right types of providers at the right price, where price has very little connection to hourly rates.  No one wants to buy time.  We want outcomes, not hours.

To solve for both the short-term and long-term goals, we start with data.  Analyzing and reducing your legal spending start with asking yourself the following questions:

What am I spending now, on what and with which providers?
How does my current spending compare to past spending?
How am I allocating my legal work?
What metrics am I using to measure cost control?
Are there other cost considerations I'm overlooking?

1.  Understand where you are now.

The first step of implementing a change is to understand the current state. Reducing legal spending first requires knowing where you are right now.  This means not only keeping up with the total dollar figure of your spending, but how much you're spending in each practice area and with which law firms or providers.

Don't forget to also investigate the work you currently perform in-house.  With an understanding of outside legal spend and in-house legal work, you will have the current picture of how you allocate the demand for legal services from the business to the supply of legal services you have available.  With this deeper insight, you'll start to see where you can actually have an impact on spending.

Without this data, you risk investing time into an area that looks compelling but won't create real savings.  For example, reducing money spent on compliance may seem like a good idea because the partners at your primary firm have very high billing rates.  But if only 5% of your annual spending goes toward compliance work or if the primary compliance firm effectively leverages associates and paralegals, your efforts won't translate into real savings for the business.

When you track data and analyze legal spending details from your e-billing system, you'll be better equipped to start a real conversation about reductions.  You can identify the practice areas and firms where your efforts will create real returns.

2.  Compare now to where you used to be.

Your business is not static.  It's important to understand where you are today, but it is even more important to understand how things change over time. After you determine where you're spending your money today, you need to compare those numbers to what you were doing last year or the last time you negotiated rates and pricing.

You may have a reliable history of sending work to a single attorney or team at a firm. You may have increased the amount of work sent to a particular firm or in a particular practice area.  If you used to send $2 million worth of business to a firm and now spend $5 million with that firm, that's a powerful position for starting rate and price negotiations.

Additionally, if your team uses multiple firms for similar work, you may benefit from consolidating that work with fewer preferred firms.  Larger companies may go through a formal panel selection process annually or every few years.  A preferred panel is a great tool to provide the best legal services to the business at the best price if you have the team and time to implement this type of program.  But you can still achieve the benefits of allocating work to fewer firms without a full preferred panel program.

You don't always know what the demand for legal services will be from year to year.  But if your data shows that you have a history of allocating work among several firms, ask those firms what they would be willing to do to earn a greater share of that work.

3. Understand how you're allocating work.

After you have an understanding of the dollar value of your legal spending, you need to know how you're allocating different types of work, to whom and why. How you're assigning your legal work certainly depends on finding the provider with the right expertise but should be equally dependent on its business impact and complexity.

Your high-impact, high-complexity work probably belongs with the more expensive firms.  An example of a high-impact matter could be a large litigation that threatens the balance sheet of the company.  Or it might be a patent for the core technology driving your business.  In either case, you might choose to work with the very best money can buy.

Every year the legal press makes a big deal about high billable rates for eye-catching headlines.  But for your highest-impact and highest-complexity work, those firms and lawyers are probably a bargain at twice the price.  You're buying outcomes, not hours.

Too many companies simply send the rest of their work along with their high-impact work without stopping to see if smaller matters would be better handled by a lower-cost provider.  There are a variety of suppliers beyond the Am Law 100, such as specialty firms, alternative legal service providers, nonlegal consultants and your in-house team.

Your low-impact, low-complexity work probably doesn't need to go to the premier firms.  Specialty firms, alternative legal service providers, consultants and solo practitioners may not have massive staff and unlimited support resources, but they can still provide high-quality work at a fraction of the price.

You may also have high-impact but routine work where speed and a deep understanding of business issues are important.  The most common example here is commercial contracts.

For customer contracts, any delay in reviewing costs the company revenue. An extensive back-and-forth over mundane legal minutiae could cause your company to miss a quarter's revenue target.  In-house teams will have a better understanding of business priorities and can better deliver the right kind of legal work with speed at the right price.

When you satisfy your demand with the right mix of supply, the potential for savings is much greater than through rate discounts alone.  Allocating work based on impact and complexity provides far greater cost savings than a 10% rate reduction when the right provider is already half the price.

4. Use the right metrics.

You can't manage what you can't measure.  You get what you incentivize.  These two classic business statements tell us that we need to measure savings with the right metrics.

How are you measuring cost savings today?  Is it through average hourly rates?  Adjustments to bills based on guidelines?  If you measure discounts on rates to determine savings, you're going to focus on high hourly rate firms that discount their hour rates.  But is that really saving your company any money?

Achieving savings by reallocating work rather than by negotiating rate discounts definitely makes sense.  But with the wrong metrics it is harder for the C-suite to understand what you've accomplished.  If you measure and report savings only as the discount on standard rates, the reallocation effort appears to have achieved nothing.  In fact, if the work was moved in-house or to a provider with a lower but not discounted rate, it may appear that you have lost savings because you won't have a discount to report.

In fact, with the wrong metrics, if you were to implement a routing tool for automated nondisclosure agreement review, it might appear to be a driver of cost even if it created hard dollar savings from external counsel and soft dollar savings — i.e., efficiencies — from allowing in-house counsel to spend time on high-impact, high-complexity work.  With the right metrics, you can show the true return on these investments.

To demonstrate the full value of the savings and quality initiatives, you might need to use new metrics.  I am certainly not advocating for cherry-picking data or choosing vanity metrics.  To the contrary, the right metrics will actually make more sense to the business, the CEO and the board.

Legal expense as a percentage of revenue has been promoted in Association of Corporate Counsel benchmarking studies and Altman Weil Inc. surveys. It is well understood and trusted by chief financial officers and CEOs.

Whichever metrics are used to measure legal cost controls, just remember that you get what you incentivize.  If you're going to achieve cost savings, you need to use the right metrics to incentivize your team and showcase results.

5. Monitor compliance with your billing guidelines, consider automation of certain legal tasks and standardize workflows.

The preceding four steps are the critical actions that build on each other to significantly trim legal spending.  It's a journey.  You don't need to take all the steps all at once to achieve results.  Alongside those major considerations, there are a couple other things to keep in mind to run alongside those longer-term initiatives.

The first is billing guidelines.  Your billing guidelines let your firms know what it means to be a good legal partner to your department and a good business partner to your company.

Guidelines often devolve into rules about copy charges and not billing excessively for underqualified people — things your firms probably already do on their own to better serve their clients.  You should always be monitoring compliance with your billing guidelines and enforcing timekeeper rates, but it is important to remember that ensuring that your firms only bill for work in accordance with your guidelines isn't actual savings — it only prevents overcharging.

Another way to reduce legal costs and improve response time is to automate low-complexity, low-impact legal tasks and standardize workflows.  Automation of basic document review by artificially intelligent contract review tools can be a big time and money saver.  As an example, nondisclosure agreements are high-volume but typically low-impact documents that can be reviewed with the help of AI-enabled tools.

In addition to automation, standardized playbooks designed by the legal team to give other departments a checklist of items to review can also help improve turnaround time and reduce costs.  For example, a sourcing manager in a procurement department could be given a checklist of five or six specific business and legal terms to review before sending to the legal team.

Automation and standardization improve speed of delivery and reduce cost of delivery for the business.

The Path to Lower Legal Spending

It's time to shift the perspective on cost reduction beyond hourly rates and copy charges.  As legal departments, you need to look at where you are now, how that compares to the past, how you're allocating your work and whether you're using the right legal spending metrics to achieve real savings.  These steps with effective legal billing guidelines, automation and standardization provide the foundation to match your company's demand for legal services to the right legal service providers to trim your spending while improving delivery.

Nathan Wenzel is co-founder at SimpleLegal Inc.

NALFA, a non-profit group, is building a worldwide network of attorney fee expertise. Our network includes members, faculty, and fellows with expertise on the reasonableness of attorney fees.  We help organize and recognize qualified attorney fee experts from across the U.S. and around the globe.  Our attorney fee experts also include court adjuncts such as bankruptcy fee examiners, special fee masters, and fee dispute neutrals.

Every year, we announce the nation's top attorney fee experts.  Attorney fee experts are retained by fee-seeking or fee-challenging parties in litigation to independently prove reasonable attorney fees and expenses in court or arbitration.  The following NALFA profile quotes are based on bio, CV, case summaries and case materials submitted to and verified by us.  Here are the nation's top attorney fee experts of 2020:

"The Nation's Top Attorney Fee Expert"
John D. O'Connor
O'Connor & Associates
San Francisco, CA
 
"Over 30 Years of Legal Fee Audit Expertise"
Andre E. Jardini
KPC Legal Audit Services, Inc.
Glendale, CA

"The Nation's Top Bankruptcy Fee Examiner"
Robert M. Fishman
Cozen O'Connor
Chicago, IL

"Widely Respected as an Attorney Fee Expert"
Elise S. Frejka
Frejka PLLC
New York, NY
 
"Experienced on Analyzing Fees, Billing Entries for Fee Awards"
Robert L. Kaufman
Woodruff Spradlin & Smart
Costa Mesa, CA

"Highly Skilled on a Range of Fee and Billing Issues"
Daniel M. White
White Amundson APC
San Diego, CA
 
"Extensive Expertise on Attorney Fee Matters in Common Fund Litigation"
Craig W. Smith
Robbins LLP
San Diego, CA
 
"Highly Experienced in Dealing with Fee Issues Arising in Complex Litigation"
Marc M. Seltzer
Susman Godfrey LLP
Los Angeles, CA

"Total Mastery in Resolving Complex Attorney Fee Disputes"
Peter K. Rosen
JAMS
Los Angeles, CA
 
"Understands Fees, Funding, and Billing Issues in Cross Border Matters"
Glenn Newberry
Eversheds Sutherland
London, UK
 
"Solid Expertise with Fee and Billing Matters in Complex Litigation"
Bruce C. Fox
Obermayer Rebmann LLP
Pittsburgh, PA
 
"Excellent on Attorney Fee Issues in Florida"
Debra L. Feit
Stratford Law Group LLC
Fort Lauderdale, FL
 
"Nation's Top Scholar on Attorney Fees in Class Actions"
Brian T. Fitzpatrick
Vanderbilt Law School
Nashville, TN
 
"Great Leader in Analyzing Legal Bills for Insurers"
Richard Zujac
Liberty Mutual Insurance
Philadelphia, PA

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