One of the issues facing today's legal marketplace is the lack of transparency around prices. Most legal professionals do not publish their prices, and finding the data needed to compare various service providers is a time-consuming task. This is one of the reasons why legal buying decisions are still based on personal relationships and "who you know", rather than on objective measures of quality and price.
In the end, a more efficient legal marketplace serves everyone. The ability of markets to incorporate information that provides the maximum amount of opportunities to purchasers and sellers of legal services to effect transactions without increasing transaction costs is core to an efficient market. In legal, this transparency is missing. By releasing the Legal.io pricing tool, we are looking to contribute to a more transparent legal services marketplace.
This pricing tool renders hourly rate information for various practice areas and markets, shows salary information, and data on specific legal services where available. Pending more feedback from the community, we'd like to be able to tell you what it would cost to:
- hire a [insert area of law here] lawyer with x years of experience (hourly rates)
- solve a specific problem, such as dissolving a corporate entity (fee ranges)
- hire a lawyer with a specific expertise (salaries for full or part-time resources)
In it's current state, the pricing tool is geared towards legal professionals, both on the provider and the buyer side:
- on the provider side: for lawyers interesting in knowing how their rates compare to others
- on the buyer side: for in-house lawyers that are looking to understand market pricing
At present, the tool renders data for San Francisco, and we're in the process of adding data points for every major US legal market. We've been using this tool internally to share market data with customers using Legal.io to hire legal resources., and are excited to gradually release this dataset to the community.
Whilst we are excited about this tool, there is much work that remains to be done. We are in the process of segmenting this data by firm size, and other vectors that have a big impact on the price point. We're also soliciting feedback from the community to make sure this data can be turned into insights that deliver real value as part of the legal buying process.
Are you a legal professional? We need your feedback. What data would empower you to make more informed legal buying decisions? Shoot me an email at pieter@legal.io - I'd love to hear from you.
