Seth Rowland has recently published two very useful articles on Document Assembly and Return on Investment.
A Systemic Approach to Legal Document Automation (I): Building Technology Bridges, and
A Systemic Approach to Legal Document Automation (II): Defining the ROI
They both tie in with the pressure lawfirms are feeling to abandon (or partly abandon) hourly billing.
The premise behind this approach is very simple (and I have seen it work very effectively with clients). Lets say you normally bill a client 5 hours to prepare all the wills and associated documents connected with estate planning. If you charge $300 per hour, that’s $1,500. So you invest in Document Assembly and tell your clients you are reducing the amount you charge for will preparation to a flat fee of $1,000. But meantime, due to the efficiencies of your document assembly routines, it only takes 2 hours to prepare the package, and virtually all of that can be done by a paralegal. All the attorney has to do is make a couple of tweaks and bless it.
So the end result is that your client is happy because he has saved $500. Meanwhile, your effective hourly rate has gone from $300 an hour to $500 an hour. You will very rapidly recover the cost of setting up the system and from there on it is all gravy.
Check out the articles on Seth’s Blog
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