How can PERSUIT's Price Benchmarking show insights into Fixed Fees and Hourly Rates?

PERSUIT's Price Benchmarking allows you to drill into market-driven data to gain a granular-level understanding around Fixed Fees and Hourly Rates across the industry. 

• Navigating to Price Benchmarking
• Price Benchmarking for Fixed Fees
• Price Benchmarking for Hourly Rates

Navigating to Price Benchmarking

To navigate to PERSUIT's Price Benchmarking, start by clicking the hamburger menu icon. This button can be found at the top left of any page next to the PERSUIT logo.

Select Price Benchmarking when the menu expands.

At the top of the page, you'll find two tabs: Fees and Rates/Hour. 

Price Benchmarking for Fixed Fees

When you're in the Fees tab, you'll see a filter bar that allows you to choose the exact Legal Service, Area of Law, Firm AMLAW Ranking, Industry, and more depending on the information you're selecting. Benchmarking information will not appear until filter selections are made.

Note: At this time, the Fees data is based on US matters within Litigation (Dispute) and Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) and all prices shown are in USD. If a specific price benchmark is unavailable, it does not yet meet required minimum thresholds and criteria which PERSUIT has implemented to ensure confidentiality and confidence in the data. The thresholds include:

• • Only matters that have run within the last three years (on a rolling basis) within the USA are included.
  • Only fixed and capped fees from the final proposals are taken into account. This includes all proposals, not just the winning proposals. Outliers and billable hours are excluded.
  • A minimum threshold of 20 proposals from at least three different firms across requests from three distinct organizations, need to be met.

Our data is growing each day as corporate legal teams run matters through the PERSUIT platform. We encourage you to check back, as the data will continue to improve and offer insights into more categories.

After the filters have been chosen, there are two main sections of Price Benchmarking for you to delve into the data: the Matter Price section and the Phases & Activity Fees section.

Matter Price

This section shows a continuum of what a matter's total price would be based on your selected filters. This continuum can be thought of as a degree of complexity. Higher complexity matters are to the right and are more expensive. The teal section shows the middle 50% of matters. The leftmost part of the bar in gray, indicates the 25th percentile, the rightmost part of the bar in gray, is the 75th percentile. This can be thought of as 75% of all the matters on PERSUIT fall below this point.

Underneath the benchmarking spread, you'll see a confidence indicator next to the Price Benchmark Range. The confidence score relies on both the volume and density of the data within your selected filters. The more data and the narrower the range, the higher the score. The confidence score is calculated in real time and only “High” or “Medium” confidence will return results – if the confidence is “Low” the page will not return any results.

Phases and Activity Fees

The Phases and Activity Fees section shows you the benchmarking data of common phases and activities typically found in the matter type based on your selected filters.

For each phase, you'll see a similar continuum of complexity and range in price to inform you of what pricing you should expect at the phase-level.

You'll also see a pie chart explaining the percentage of times this phase is present in a matter.

Within each phase shown in Price Benchmarking, you'll be able to drill down into the data even further to find activities commonly included within that phase and related benchmarking data points. At the activity level, an important distinction to understand is that we are accounting for assumptions, where applicable. Or said another way, activity level prices shown are unit pricing. For example, for depositions, if a Deposition pricing item within a request had an assumption of 5 depositions, and a proposal had $50,000 entered as the final price, that would equate to $10,000 per deposition which is what would be used in the calculation for the activity price range.

Price Benchmarking for Hourly Rates

When you're in the Rates/Hours tab, you'll see a filter bar where you can choose the exact Location, Firm Cohort, and Legal Service to allow for specificity in your search. Benchmarking information will not appear until at least the Location filter has been chosen. 

After the filters have been chosen, you'll see the available, relevant rates listed below.

You can use the View Mode drop menu to the right of the navigation bar to select how the information is presented, whether by Year-over-Year vs Benchmarking or Cohort vs Seniority Level.

You'll also see a Confidence Level indicator where you can to get an understanding of the confidence score and how the hourly rate information is populated. 

If you have any questions regarding PERSUIT's Price Benchmarking, please reach out to your designated CSM.