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

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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John Maynard Keynes' quote "in the long run we are all dead" rejected the notion that inflation would control itself absent government intervention in the short term.  It has equal application to flat fee pricing of litigation, where, for many clients, all that matters is what the lawyer is doing (and charging) “today,” because there is no “tomorrow.”

We do not dispute that "the fixed fee can be split into segments," (as stated most recently in Adam Smith, Esq.) but clearly some segments (the first!) are far more important than others.

Many early adopters of Confluence Law Partners, CLP’s flat fee IP litigation model are smaller sized technology companies that can’t afford the high cost of hiring hourly billing IP litigators.   These clients care little about the price of the entire litigation, not because their matters are expected to conclude any earlier or are easier to resolve than a typical IP litigation, but due to the limited amount of money available to spend on lawyers.

The client mindset is that it is OK to bail on the litigation, and that their lawyers should be ready at any time to help them implement this action - even if they've previously failed to share this strategy with counsel.

So what is the best approach to setting a fixed price?

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