How to use PERSUIT's Price Benchmarking for Fixed Fees and 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 in the expanding menu on the left side of any PERSUIT page. 

Select Price Benchmarking when the menu expands in the Market Intel section.

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

Price Benchmarking for Fixed Fees

When you're in the Fees tab of Price Benchmarking, you'll see a purple filter bar with different filters and settings to flexibly control the types of matters you’d like to explore.  

You’ll first notice an ANY vs. ALL dropdown selection to adjust your search scope for precision or breadth. Selecting ALL is treated as an "and" combination between filters. This will narrow down the results with each successive filter selected as it requires that ALL the underlying data match ALL selected filter values in order to show related results. Selecting ANY is treated as an "or" combination between filters and will broaden the results with each successive filter selected.

The filters allow you to choose the exact Practice Area, Location, Client Sector, Firm Cohort and more depending on the information being selected. These filters are dynamic and there are no limitations to the combinations of filters used. The Practice Area filters are defined by the PERSUIT taxonomy which is a modification of the SALI standard. 

When any, or all, of the Litigation/Disputes practice areas are chosen, an option to Show Advanced Settings will appear below the filters. 

You’ll be able to define the legal complexity related to that practice area.

Note: At this time, to determine the current price benchmark, PERSUIT analyzes requests from the past four years, excluding those from the most recent three months. To account for inflationary and other impacts to prices, bids have been weighted such that more recent bids have a greater influence on the results, with older bids contributing progressively less:

• Current Year Bids: 33% of the total influence (strongest influence)
• One-Year-Old Bids: 27% of the total influence
• Two-Year-Old Bids: 20% of the total influence
• Three-Year-Old Bids: 13% of the total influence
• Four-Year-Old Bids: 7% of the total influence (least influence)

Only Fixed and Capped Fees from final proposals are included - outliers and billable hours are excluded. A minimum of 20 proposals from at least 5 different firms across requests from 3 distinct organizations is required. All prices are shown in USD.

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.

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 Locations, Firm Cohort, and Client Sector and Practice Areas to allow for specificity in your search.

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

You'll also see a section that explains how the rate benchmarking is estimated. 

Price benchmarks for hourly rates are based on rate cards submitted on matters in PERSUIT over the past two calendar years.

• Year-over-Year (YoY) changes compare the most recent full calendar year to the prior year, based on the last 27 months of data.
• All rates are displayed in USD, with rates for firms outside the US converted to USD using the foreign exchange rates based on the submission date.
• Confidence levels are determined through statistical analysis, with higher confidence given to categories where data points are more tightly clustered around the median compared to other results.
• A minimum of 3 clients, 10 firms, and 10 proposals is required for any combination of filters. Where minimum thresholds are not met, certain timekeeper levels or firm cohorts will be omitted.
• As more data becomes available, additional locations, timekeeper levels, and firm cohorts will be displayed automatically.

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