How to use PERSUIT's Price Benchmarking for Fixed Fees and Rates – PERSUIT

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 your own organization or the entire industry.

Navigating to Price Benchmarking
- Display Currency Across Fixed Fees and Hourly Rates
Price Benchmarking for Fixed Fees
Price Benchmarking for Hourly Rates

Navigating to Price Benchmarking

To navigate to PERSUIT's Price Benchmarking, start in the expanding menu on the left side of any PERSUIT page and select Price Benchmarking.

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

Display Currency

There is a Display Currency menu at the top right to choose the preferred currency in which the information is presented.

Note: Current pricing percentiles are converted using today's spot rate. Historical trend data is converted using the average exchange rate across all daily records for the relevant calendar year. If no yearly average is available for a given period, today's spot rate is used as a fallback.

Explore View in Fixed Fees

The Fees section starts with an Explore view that lets you browse curated benchmark tiles organized by three categories: Matter Type & Area of Law, Complexity, and Firm Cohort & Location.

Click any tile to apply its filters and jump directly to the pricing benchmarks for that segment. (Note: This view is not available on My Organization.)

Filters in Fixed Fees

At the top of the Fees section, you’ll see an All Filters button leading to a menu with different filters and settings to flexibly control the types of matters you’d like to explore. You’ll see the Filters menu expand on the right side of the page.

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Select your main view: Industry Benchmarks or My Organization Benchmarks. Industry Benchmarks provides broad market analysis across your industry. My Organization Benchmarks is available only to in-house customers and displays insights tailored to your internal performance. (Note: Firms using Price Benchmarking will not see My Organization data.)

There are five main filters to choose from: Matter Type, Area of Law, Client Sector, Location, Use Case, Provider Type.

Depending on the Matter Type is selected, additional filters may appear like a Complexity Modifiers filter or a Phases filter. The options within these additional filters change based on the Matter Type.

At the bottom of the Filters menu is a Compare with X toggle. This toggle will allow you to compare the fees between the Industry v. Organization views simultaneously for side-by-side context.

After filters are set, the related benchmarks will appear. You’ll be able to view the Matter Price benchmarks and the Phase and Activity benchmarks.

Matter Price

This section first shows a Matter Price benchmarking 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 light 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 Matter Price benchmarking spread, you'll first see a numeric Industry Price Benchmarking range showing the min and max prices for your selected criteria.

You’ll see a colored bar chart icon representing how confident PERSUIT is in this benchmark:

Dark green with 3 bars filled = High confidence (robust data)
Light green with 2 bars filled = Low confidence (limited data)

Next to it is the Benchmark Source that shows whether the data is:

Observed — Real pricing data from matters executed on PERSUIT
Estimated — Derived from PERSUIT's proprietary data and analytics (used when observed data is limited).

You’ll see the Industry Median listed here.

Click View Trend to see how this range and the median have shifted over the past four quarters.

Lastly, if you have the Compare with X toggle turned on in the filters, you’ll also be able to view Your Organization’s Range and Your Organization’s Median to easily compare against the Industry metrics.

This Matter Price section is always in a fixed view to the right of the page.

Phase & Activity Fee Benchmarks

The Phases & Activity Fees section shows 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.

Within each phase shown in Price Benchmarking, use the Activity tab 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.

The Trend tab shows quarterly performance with median movement across each phase. Use the dropdown to drill into specific activities, and toggle between visual and table views. The legend automatically updates to distinguish between observed and estimated data.

How Fixed Fee Benchmarks are Calculated

Where Does the Data Come From?

Benchmarks are built from real fee proposals submitted through PERSUIT
Only Fixed and Capped Fees from final proposals are included - estimates and billable hours are not
Prices are converted to USD and adjusted for inflation, so you're always comparing apples to apples across time
The most recent 3 months of data are excluded as an antitrust safeguard

Bid Weighting

Bids are weighted so that more recent submissions have a stronger influence on the benchmark result - older bids still contribute, but progressively less:

Current year: 30% (strongest)
One year old: 25%
Two years old: 19%
Three years old: 12%
Four years old: 7%
Five or more years old: 7% (least)

Observed vs. Estimated

Observed results are drawn directly from real submitted pricing with strong market coverage across proposals, firms, and clients
Estimated results appear when there isn't enough exact data for your filter combination - instead of showing nothing, we use a model trained on all historical data to give you a useful starting point
Estimated results are still meaningful, but treat them as a guide rather than a definitive market rate

When Might I See Less Data?

An Observed benchmark requires at least 20 proposals from 10 different firms across 6 distinct organizations - if that bar isn't met, you'll see an Estimated result instead
Some phase or activity rows may not appear at all if there isn't enough data to support even a basic estimate

What Does Confidence Mean?

Confidence reflects the depth of market data behind the result across proposals, firms, and clients as well as whether it's Observed or Estimated
The weakest dimension sets the overall confidence level, so high proposal volume won't offset low client or firm diversity

Price Benchmarking for Hourly Rates

Explore View
Filters
Hourly Rate Benchmarks
How Hourly Rate Benchmarks are Calculated

Explore View in Hourly Rates

The Rates/Hours section starts with an Explore view that lets you browse curated benchmark tiles organized by three categories: Location, Matter Type & Area of Law, Complexity, and Firm Cohort.

Filters in Hourly Rates

You’ll see an All Filters button to access the Filters menu. These filters and settings allow you to uncover position-level based pricing tailored to your selection.

In the expanded Filters menu, select your main view of either Industry Benchmarks or My Organization Benchmarks before drilling down further with additional filters. Industry Benchmarks provides broad market analysis based on industry data. My Organization benchmarking is exclusive to in-house organization, providing insights tailored to internal performance. (Note: Firms using Price Benchmarking will not see My Organization data.)

In each view, there are six main filters to choose from: Location, Matter Type, Area of Law, Client Sector, Use Case, and Provider Type.

Use Firm Cohort filters to analyze hourly rates in more detail. Expand this section to access additional filters, including AmLaw/Global Ranking and Diversity Certification, to segment your data.

Depending on the Matter Type is selected, additional filters may appear like a Complexity Modifiers filter. The options within these additional filters change based on the Matter Type.

At the bottom of the Filters menu is a Compare with X toggle. This toggle will allow you to compare the hourly rates between the Industry v. Organization views simultaneously for side-by-side context.

Hourly Rate Benchmarks

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

Each available title displays:

An hourly rate benchmarking continuum based on your selected filters.

A colored bar chart icon representing how confident PERSUIT is in this benchmark:
- Dark green with 3 bars filled = High confidence (robust data)
- Light green with 2 bars filled = Low confidence (limited data)

A Benchmark Source that shows whether the data is:
- Observed — Real pricing data from matters executed on PERSUIT
- Estimated — Derived from PERSUIT's proprietary data and analytics (used when observed data is limited).

A Trend analysis that shows how rates are trending quarter to quarter.

How Hourly Rate Benchmarks are Calculated