Legal pricing experts Burcher Jennings and Validatum have partnered with legal tech firm Neota Logic with the objective to disrupt the world of legal pricing for the benefit of clients and firms.

Faster processing

The partnership is to launch of ‘virtual pricing director,’ a new artificial intelligence (AI) powered legal pricing tool designed to make the pricing process quicker and easier for law firms. The product builds the global legal pricing expertise of Richard Burcher into Neota Logic’s legal-tech innovation experience to deliver the confidence-building openness and transparency the form believes is needed for 21st century pricing. The platform will offer intelligent templates that incorporate an array of practice areas, tasks, rates and clauses, and produces an automated pricing dashboard that presents clients and law firms with a clear breakdown of expected spending, offering unprecedented accuracy and transparency in the legal pricing process for clients, while saving time and money for firms. The platform also helps law firms meet compliance requirements under the new transparency regulations coming into effect in December.

Pricing efficiency drive

Richard Burcher, co-founder of the virtual pricing director, said ‘market pressures and regulatory requirements are fuelling an inevitable drive towards greater price efficiency across the legal sector. Given rising client expectations and the step-changes in the business side of law in recent years, it is extraordinary that the prevalent pricing methodologies continue to range from ‘gut feel’ estimates, to complex, time-consuming yet opaque deconstructions of every element within a legal matter. Virtual pricing director enables fee earners at all levels to generate high quality and accurate pricing proposals in a fraction of the time that it currently takes.’ Rick Seabrook, from legal technology experts Neota Logic, said ‘at the press of a button, virtual pricing director will give users a complete pricing summary, outlining not only the fees options but also an explanation of how they are calculated, making it easy for the client to select the right option for them. One more click and it will be automatically emailed to the client, and put on your client file. All of this takes you somewhere between 3 to 5 minutes depending upon how complex the matter might be.’