A technology-driven virtual law firm that never bills by the hour
No Billable Hours – EVER!
While the need to find an alternative to the billable hour is not new, Nexterra made the decision in 2019 that we could not decry the equating of wasted time with value anymore while doing it for some clients (those that insisted) and not for others. We struggled to reconcile our client-centered ethos with the notion that a 5-minute phone call was worth a 15-minute increment on a bill just because it’s a more practical way of billing. Something had to give. In early 2019, we began discussions with our clients and eliminated hourly billing altogether. We had to part ways with a few clients and with them we decided to reevaluate all of our “old” ways of doing things.
Technology Driven
To eliminate billable hours meant to take some measure of risk. We recognized that if we priced a matter and were wrong about our assumptions that would be our problem. We wondered, isn’t that it should always have been? As a firm, we had to get efficient. We invested in and committed to maintaining state-of-the-art infrastructure to provide lawyers an efficient work-from-anywhere structure while giving clients transparency and options ranging from video-chat-from-anywhere capability with their lawyer to self-help options all in one place.
Value Focused
We looked at every component of our service delivery from the client perspective and put everything on the table. If we were going to really focus on the client, then the ultimate metric of fees would have to be value. That is, their perception of our value. And so began a long journey of discovery and discussion before we realized that pricing of services (other than the simplest of matters perhaps) was about what we call CPV (Client Perceived Value). To determine that, we came to accept that we needed to be open in our discussions with our clients about fees (something lawyers generally hate). It meant lawyers getting uncomfortable to make their clients more comfortable. Again a seemingly obvious revelation that continues to elude much of the legal industry to this day.
We hope that you are intrigued by Nexterra Law and more to the point, we hope you’ll join our family of mavericks, pioneers and disrupters of the old ways of doing things. We welcome you to take this journey with us. We welcome you to Nexterra Law.
