AltFee - The Foundation of Your Alternative Fee Arrangement System
Welcome to this month's article of Let’s Be Frank, a monthly newsletter series hosted on LinkedIn and authored by our founder Digby. If you are interested in following along pop over to the Let’s Be Frank LinkedIn page here and hit the subscribe button to have these articles sent straight to your inbox.
Welcome to this month's article of Let’s Be Frank. You’re joining over 1478 others who are curious about challenging the status quo.
Who Should Keep Reading This Article?
This article will be of specific interest to anyone in the legal industry as I dive into the SaaS product that I have been working on for the last year. This product will help anyone who uses AFA’s or thinks they may need to move in that direction.
AltFee Technology
As soon as I started down the path of moving away from hourly billing, I knew I wanted to share it with everyone as I felt so strongly our industry was in need of change. I share this passion with both of my sons, Digby Junior and Scott. In fact, Scott was a practicing lawyer who experienced many of the frustrations that I have previously written about.
As we launched Frank Fee in September, 2020, I started down a concurrent path, along with my sons, of creating a SaaS product that would help all lawyers move away from the billable hour and enjoy the many benefits that DL&Co. was experiencing. I believed that lawyers had reached the tipping point where there were not enough waking hours in the day to give one more billable hour. Further, we realized that the manual system we had created had limitations and areas where efficiency was lacking, and knew that software designed specifically for the legal industry could dramatically improve any law firm’s alternative fee arrangement system.
AltFee was born from the understanding that most law firms struggle with pricing their services when they are not pricing on an hourly basis. That's why we created a knowledge management and collaboration pricing software tool for law firms, so they can practice law without having to charge by the hour. We have created an easy to implement tool that not only supports the accurate pricing of a legal project, but also provides a platform for knowledge sharing and collaboration that facilitates continuous learning firm wide.
Photo: Co-Founders of AltFee Solutions (from left) Digby Leigh, Scott Leigh and Digby Leigh Jr.
In October of 2021, the SaaS product, under the banner of AltFee, was launched in beta at DL&Co. and it is now the foundation of our alternative fee arrangement system, including how we scope and price all of our new work. AltFee is now available to everyone and you can follow the AltFee journey and learn more about the software by clicking here.
We are now over three months into our rollout of AltFee into DL&Co. and we are realizing many of the benefits of the software:
our efficiency firm-wide is way up (Billing Realization rates up - see case study below);
our lawyers and paralegals are pricing with more confidence than ever;
our experienced team members are able to asynchronously mentor, collaborate and strategize; and
our customers sincerely appreciate our commitment to being an innovative firm, by investing in a software solution for better pricing.
For a much more in-depth look at DL&Co.’s journey, the case study produced by AltFee can be found here: Case Study
If you go back to my second article, which was my first of two on how we moved away from hourly billing, you will see the discussion on breaking your work into types of projects and then listing all the factors (both input and value based factors) that go into pricing that project. AltFee is the technology to make this easy with all your pricing stored in one place in a collaborative, continuous learning environment.
I am so excited to see this become available to others in the hopes of creating incredibly positive change in our industry.
Until next time,
