A recent article titled 5 Ways to Cut Legal Research Costs by a Westlaw Attorney at Thomson Reuters, shared ways to cut your legal research costs. These include best practices like starting with Key Numbers and formulating a concise legal question prior to starting. Perhaps the most valuable tip is their last, minimize out of plan costs. It’s important to subscribe to the legal research resources your team needs but avoid oversubscribing to services you don’t use or need.
Even though Thomson Reuters’ tips are very helpful and prove that better preparation can greatly improve the efficiency of your time spent researching, they fail to address the underlying issue – odds are that your legal research subscription costs are too high to begin with.
Our experience shows that law firms could be overpaying by as much as 50% for their legal research. Buyers of legal research services often don’t realize they are paying a different amount than others for similar services. The amount you pay depends on your success in negotiating to achieve a target subscription price.
How do you know if you’re overpaying?
“What is a fair price?” is the question every legal research customer would like to answer. Given the variable pricing structure of services and your firm’s unique needs, there are only two sources for this information. One is your sales service rep who works on your vendor’s behalf, not your behalf. The other is an experienced consultant who frequently negotiates legal research contracts, such as Legal Counsel Consulting, working for your interests.
With extensive experience negotiating in the law firm industry, we can quickly identify the target price range for the research resources your firm requires. In fact, we sometimes tell firms that their pricing is at the low end of the scale and there’s little opportunity to lower their subscription rates. But more often than not, we encounter firms that are overpaying. And the amount of overpayment can be significant.
Is it time to ask an expert familiar with industry pricing for help?
It is hard to know if your costs are competitive without looking at your specific situation. In some cases, firms are paying fair, competitive rates. An expert should be able to do a complimentary, no-commitment assessment and can tell you up front if they believe your rates are spot on or too high. You then decide how best to leverage this information.
Visit our contact page to request and schedule a short complimentary consultation. We’ll quickly let you know how your subscription costs compare.