Flat Fee IP : Flat Fee Intellectual Property Lawyers & Attorneys : Confluence Law Partners : Set Cost Litigation & Controlling Client Costs

Earlier this week, I was asked whether I had considered approaching venture capital firms to take a stake in my business [Confluence Law Partners (CLP)] large enough to cover our "burn rate" for a year or two.  Apparently, what makes CLP an attractive investment is that we are, in VC-speak, "post-revenue," i.e., in addition to having a business model that conceptually makes a lot of sense, we have an actual business that is generating revenues, and we could significantly increase profit by using outside investment to increase the scale of our delivery system.

The key assumption made by the person asking the question (who is a non-lawyer investment fund manager) was that non-lawyers like themselves could invest in, own or manage a law firm.  Of course, this is prohibited under US regulations known as professional ethics.

However, not only is non-lawyer investment allowed elsewhere in the world, as explained after the jump, this change is coming to the US.

 

 

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The term stalking horse originally derived from the practice of hunters using a horse or other animal to cover their approach to fowl. In business, a stalking horse can be used to describe the practice of a company attracting multiple bids for acquisition by beginning negotiations with a potential purchaser with the intent to flesh out competing, hopefully superior, offers. Companies wishing to acquire a company also use a stalking horse third party to identify the risks in such a takeover while sheltering their reputation. Not surprisingly, “[t]he loser in the exercise appears to be the stalking horse. “
 

What we are finding, somewhat frustratingly, is that CLP’s practice of providing, up front, a firm price and developed litigation strategy, is sometimes used by potential clients as a stalking horse to extract better deals from hourly firms.

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JED

    [walking away] Numbers, Mrs. Landingham.

MRS. LANDINGHAM

    Excuse me?

JED

   If you want to convince me of something, show me numbers!

THE WEST WING "TWO CATHEDRALS" (2d season finale, 2001)

While clients agree with the criticism of hourly billing, the reality is they still have significant reservations about using an alternative fee agreement (AFA). Like fictional President Jed Barlit in The West Wing, clients aren’t going to tip and truly adopt AFAs until their lawyers can “show me numbers.”

Unfortunately, AFA firms don't yet have the numbers.  The great bulk of pricing data currently available is based on inefficient hourly billing, and, consequently, is of limited value.   Furthermore, the tools necessary for outside counsel to collect, analyze and present meaningful cost and profit data on AFA cases across clients and markets still need to be developed.

 

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 A Japanese IP firm has expressed interest in sharing fees with CLP on US-based IP litigation, prompting us to ask ourselves whether this is ethically permissible.

We already knew that here in California or elsewhere around the country the rules of professional conduct permit fee sharing between US based lawyers who are not members of the same law firm.   (Keeping in mind that local requirements can vary as discussed in the postscript below.)

The ABA’s 2009 paper, “Joint Responsibility: Sharing Legal Fees Between Lawyers Not in the Same Firm,” confirms the wide-spread acceptance of fee sharing and provides some good examples of the different state rules.

Fee sharing is part of CLP’s DNA because it allows us to scale with expert patent and IP transaction lawyers without bearing the incredibly high overhead of keeping all this great talent under one roof. We’ve had to become fluent on the applicable ethical rules. Prospective clients are less willing to hire CLP unless they are comfortable, in their words, “with how this [fee sharing] works.”  

For example, a recent CLP pitch deck included the following slide explaining how the client enters into one engagement agreement signed by each of the fee sharing attorneys, as well as how the agreement discloses the fee arrangement and otherwise obtains the client’s informed consent in compliance with applicable ethical rules.

So CLP gets fee sharing. We use it successfully with other stateside lawyers and firms. Yet could we take it overseas?   We were highly incented to do so based on the big-time benefits of fee sharing for all concerned: the client; the referring Japanese firm; and CLP. 

• The client, a Japanese technology company, would get cost-effective and expert patent trial counsel from CLP, and also would receive continuing advice, counsel and guidance from its trusted Japanese counsel (which, as any US lawyer who has litigated on behalf of an Asian client will tell you, is crucial to enjoying timely and effective communication between US lawyer and their Japanese clients). 
• The Japanese firm would retain a valued client relationship and would capture fee revenue that it otherwise would lose to other firms. 
• CLP would enlarge its pipeline of core IP patent litigation.

We therefore were delighted to learn that yes, we could share fees with our Japanese colleagues.

 

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Recently, a Japanese electronics manufacturer asked CLP to propose the fees and costs for a comprehensive patent license enforcement campaign aimed at improving revenue collection. CLP proposed an alternative fee arrangement that included both flat fee installments and a contingency on any recovery obtained (the “Alternative Fee Arrangement” or “flat fee agreement”). The proposed flat fee agreement covered legal services through, but not extending beyond, trial. During the negotiation of the agreement, the client raised an interesting question:

Should CLP’s "flat fee" include post-trial motions, appeals, new trials, and/or the enforcement of the judgment?

Initially, we felt that there were too many reasons that an alternative fee firm would want to avoid agreeing to a flat fee that covered post trial legal services at the outset of the litigation.

On reflection, however, the question of what activities should be included under the flat fee umbrella was not an easy one. For many reasons, a flat fee firm may want to negotiate up front for its fixed or contingency fees to cover post-trial work.

CLP ultimately decided to include some (post-trial motions), but not all (appeals, new trials, enforcing the judgment), post-trial work under its AFA, despite the risks. Why (or why not)?

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The negotiation of an alternative fee, even if unsuccessful, provides the client with valuable feedback on their case.  As discussed by Cisco litigation manager Neal Rubin on Legal OnRamp:

[C]ounsel’s willingness (or unwillingness) to share the risks and rewards of litigation can help the client assess the strengths and weaknesses of its case. . . . [A] firm’s willingness to accept risk provides a useful litmus test that can help instruct the client whether it has realistically assessed the strength of the case. The straight billable hour model provides no such feedback.

We find ourselves applying this litmus test to a potential IP enforcement matter.  The results suggest the client may not have the strong case it thought it did, and that the engagement will crater.  So how did we get to this point, and what good can come from the possibility that we may lose the engagement?

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As discussed in E-Discovery: Taiwan Collection on a Shoestring, CLP recently faced the challenges of cutting the discovery costs of a Taiwan based wireless communications device manufacturer with a popular new technology under dispute with a competitor.

For cost sensitive clients, containing discovery costs obviously requires reducing the overall volume of documents that will be collected, uploaded, processed and produced. If one looks at the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, ("EDRM”), the industry standard for approaching discovery,you will quickly realize that the most effective way to cut total costs along the discovery pipeline is to decrease the input during collection. 

 

 

With our client, we knew our end goal was to decrease the number of irrelevant documents we collected. The most cost effective way of limiting the collection, we decided, was to work with the person most knowledgeable about the documents on the custodian’s workstation--- the custodians themselves--- to make a targeted collection instead of a full replica of the hard drive.

The challenge, then, was how to effectively work with Taiwanese custodians when travel costs to Taiwan could be 3k an attorney.

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Adam Smith Esq. recently discussed a major obstacle to setting a fixed price for litigation: trust.

Sadly, for too many of us, clients don't trust us with their money and we don't trust them to reward us fairly.

The view from here in the trenches of flat fee IP litigation is that the trust issue is really about determining what a case is worth to a client.  

The client is never going to agree to a flat fee unless it is convinced the amount invested in legal services (the flat fee) will generate an appropriate return on the investment.   The ROI determination, in turn, is based on the determination of what it is worth to the client to enforce its IP or defend claims brought by others seeking to enforce their IP.  This brings us to the trust issue, and our first  insight:

In our experience, the flat fee lawyer has no choice other than to

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The lower costs and cost certainty attributable to flat fee IP litigation has, unexpectedly but not unsurprisingly, appealed not only to traditional consumers of IP litigation, but created a market of small, often foreign, high tech companies who never before could afford top quality IP legal services.

With that said, according to Dean Gonsowski of EWeek.com,

Pre-trial discovery expenses alone now represent 50 percent of litigation costs in an average case [and i]n situations where discovery is actively used, it could represent as much as 90 percent of litigation costs, approaching and perhaps exceeding $1 million on a single case.

So what we - at CLP - quickly discovered was that it was not enough to keep attorney fees in check, we needed to re-think the way law firms conduct discovery to cut the total costs drastically for clients.

Recently CLP represented a Taiwan based wireless broadband communications device company. The company had only 4 full time employees, but a promising technology that made it the target of an IP suit from a competitor. One of our early challenges, therefore, was to collect documents from work stations and peripheral devices of employees in Taiwan under a budget that would allow the cash poor company to defend itself and eventually realize its forecasted profitability.  Early estimates from vendors were around 9-12k.

We eventually figured out how to do it for 3k.

How?

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