Bam !, inside your office, the night time before your proposal arrives, cursor blinking in your screen. And you are looking at questions 1 and a pair of from the Request Proposal.

Q1. “What exactly are your hourly rates?”

Q2. “How can you justify your hourly rates?”

After I talk to legal clients regarding their proposals, differentiating themselves is definitely the toughest part on their behalf. Experience? Great outcomes? Happy clients? Attorney bios? Yeah, they’ve it, but so the rest of the large businesses that they are in competition with. How do we stick out? How can you obtain the client to select you? Most significantly, how can you justify individuals rates?

With no structured process, most clients simply quit. You cite exactly the same things everybody else is citing, hope all went well after which dabble on a bit of that magical Biglaw cure-all: prestige.

Ah, yes. What’s prestige opting for nowadays around the place market? Are you able to purchase a bucketful?

Do you use it by doing this? By no means. But every RFP that will get sent will get back twelve proposals going so on concerning the good reputation for the firm and just how esteemed it’s.

Towards the proposal author, this will make sense. In the end, who’s the customer to state what’s and is not esteemed? It’s dependent on opinion.

Consider that, though. Is the unverifiable, untestable opinion a good foundation which to warrant hourly rates inside a proposal towards the very individual who you need to outlay cash?

And it is it something even wish to claim? In my experience, you will find six excellent reasons why you need to banish this word out of your legal proposals.