Alternative Fee Structures: How and Why to Move Away from Hourly Billing with Sonia Miller-Van Oort | Episode 127

Greg Alexander [00:00:15] Welcome to the Pro Serv podcast, a podcast for leaders of thriving boutique professional services firms. For those that are not familiar with us, Collective 54 is the first mastermind community focused entirely on the unique needs of boutique professional services firms. My name is Greg Alexander. I’m the founder and I’ll be your host today. On this episode, we’re going to discuss moving away from the billable hour. This is a hotly contested issue. Some might even say religious battle in certain sectors. And it’s important for us to have a point-counterpoint discussion around this, because sometimes making this move can increase profitability and client satisfaction quite a bit. And we’ve got a great role model with us today. Her name is Sonia Miller Van-Oort, and she is in the legal sector, which is rather married to the billable hour, and she’s got quite a story to share with us. So we’re very lucky to have her. Sonia, if you wouldn’t mind, please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your firm.

Sonia Miller-Van Oort [00:01:25] Sure. My name is Sonia Miller Van-Oort. I am the President and Principal Founder of a law firm called Sapientia Law Group. We’re located in Minneapolis, and we are a 12-attorney law firm that does a variety of work, mostly litigation, about 70% litigation and about 30% transactional work.

Greg Alexander [00:01:45] Okay. And where are you based?

Sonia Miller-Van Oort [00:01:47] In Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Greg Alexander [00:01:48] Okay, very good. So tell us a little bit about how you’ve moved away from the billable hour.

Sonia Miller-Van Oort [00:01:55] Yeah. So we started our firm 12 years ago, and prior to that I was a partner at another firm and this topic of billable hours. This is 2009, 2010 timeframe, clients, really not happy with ever-increasing billable hour rates. At that point, I was a more junior partner and there are a couple of things that I was seeing. One, clients weren’t happy with that system of billing they really wanted more budget certainty. And as a practicing litigator, what I what I observed as well was that the cost and the uncertainty of the cost to the clients became an impediment to them getting to the merits of their case. And as a litigator and advocate, that was a frustrating thing for me, trying to get the best result for them. So it was kind of a combination of those things. I participated in this about with my law school, which was kind of a big think tank about the traditional law firm model. And this issue came up and I started I heard about alternative fees, and it wasn’t so much that it was a new concept at that point people had been talking about for decades. But really very few law firms had really adopted it and were able to be successful in it. And kind of what I perceived was law firms would sometimes reluctantly do an alternative fee structure if the clients came and approached them about it, but they kind of did it kicking and screaming. And so when I was creating a new law firm model to start Sapientia Law Group, that was central to the concept of how could we deliver services differently to our clients, and trying to think how we could, instead of it being a reactionary and reluctant response, how could we lead with that as a something proactively always offered to clients, always giving them the option whether they wanted to do hourly or an alternative fee structure, but presenting it without clients having to kind of ask the question but to be upfront and say, here’s another way we can do this, which works best for your business. So that’s how it got there and how we really focused on that as a key core concept of Sapientia Law Group.

Greg Alexander [00:04:37] Okay, very good. You’ve mentioned alternative fee structure a few times, so if not the hourly or billable hour excuse me, what is the alternative?

Sonia Miller-Van Oort [00:04:47] Yeah, well, I always say the alternative is only limited by your own creativity. So we’ve developed quite a list of options. And so those can range from you can do, and I’ll just, to be clear, I’m a litigator, so that’s the world I live in. And people for years have said, well, you might be able to do alternative fees in law, but really you can’t do them in litigation. Is that way possible because there are just too many unknown factors? And I don’t believe that to be true. And so what we’ve developed are different flat fees, four phases of litigation. We’ve developed subscription fees, which would be more of a kind of that model I always liken it to your cell phone plan and paying for so many minutes a month and you can have rollovers. We do risk collars, which is another way to create some budget certainty that has a collar of risk around the price that you’re studying. And it allows some extra payment if you go beyond it, but it’s reduced and a greater payment if you come below the budget. We’ve done pullbacks, which is another way of saying we’re going to agree upfront. What are the key, key performance factors? And we’re going to hold so much back from what you’re paying us until we reach those milestones. And then one that I often use in complex litigation is the combination of a hybrid of flat fees for certain pieces of the work with success bonuses, again, around milestones or what the client defines as success at the beginning of the engagement. 

Greg Alexander [00:06:28] Hmm. Very creative. Thank you for walking us through those alternatives. And when we have our member Q&A on Friday, they’re going to ask a lot of questions about those, particularly the risk collar. That’s one of great interest to me. So if this is better for the client, better for the law firm, and maybe a way for a smaller firm to differentiate, why are founders of firms reluctant to go off of the billable hour?

Sonia Miller-Van Oort [00:06:58] Yeah, I think there’s a couple of reasons. I think the biggest impediment is the traditional law firm mindset, which is how we do business is billable hours and we’re going to, those are our metrics and that’s how we’re going to value our people and we’re going to set goals around how many hours people build. And when you get into that mindset, I will say that it is potentially contrary or conflicting with an alternative fee structure model. And the reason why is because the way I approach alternative fee structures is it’s a shared risk and a shared reward. And what we want to do is the professional services team is to be efficient in getting the results desired. That means you hopefully are using less time and working smarter to get the results. But if you’re in a firm that is going to measure and reward employees by how many hours they put in instead of the results they’re obtaining for clients, those two things get heads. And I think that is just the traditional way of law firms. And so I’ll tell you, when we first started our firm, I wondered, you know, people wanted to talk about the firm. And I was concerned about, do I really want to talk about alternative fees? You know, isn’t that the competitive advantage I’m trying to have and do I really want to be talking about so somebody else can do that. And what I finally came to is I can talk about it all day because as long as law firms won’t change their core structure and the metrics that they value people, how they value them, they can never effectively do alternative fees. And that’s effectively why I want to start a new firm, because I think it’s the whole infrastructure of how you run your business that can make alternative fees work really well. But if you got to look at what you’re compensating, how are you rewarding, how are you value your people, what are they being motivated by, all of those things. And if you don’t have that culture and model, alternative is not going to work. 

Greg Alexander [00:09:09] Yeah. And I agree with you. I mean. Talking about it and doing it. A very true two very different things for sure. So I think that’s a good explanation as to why law firms might do it. When you approach clients with this, I’m assuming maybe incorrectly, it requires quite a bit of education. Is that accurate? And if so, how do you handle that?