Speaking on global pricing trends at the event which will be held in London on 30 September, Mr Burcher will discuss his view that, whilst lawyers have a long way to go, he anticipated a couple of trends which would define how law firms dealt with pricing. “The first is that for firms to remain relevant to their client base, their whole approach to legal services pricing will have to take on a level of sophistication that is currently a complete mystery to most firms, even those who feel that they have made reasonable strides in this restriction," he says. Lawyers will have to learn how to price from other sectors, with concepts that are 'old hat'  in the manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, retail, motor industry, construction, engineering and even fast foods sectors being "quite properly plagiarised, repurposed and deployed not just within the legal profession but within the professional services sector generally. New terminology, which to most law firms is currently a foreign language,  will enter the vernacular; price elasticity of demand, yield management, first-mover pricing, price discrimination, primary and secondary segmentation, pricing psychology, price waterfalls, price banding, price fences etc," Mr Burcher adds.

Pricing Mass Customisation

The second trend predicted by Mr Burcher would see lawyers learning new pricing skill-sets. He maintains that in order to achieve the holy grail of each client paying an amount on each file that neither leaves money on the table nor leaves the client feeling that they haven't received fair value, “every single fee earner that has pricing discretion will need to learn an entire new pricing skill-set." He says this will mean mastering between 15 and 20 different pricing strategies and tactics, learning how to undertake a price sensitivity analysis on each client with physician-like diagnostic precision, and then crafting a customised, bespoke pricing solution for each client on each file - a concept he has  dubbed Pricing Mass Customisation.” Mr Burcher will discuss Global Pricing Trends at The Future of Law Summit. For further information contact benmartin@futurelex.com.