Rate Review Pro

Overview

Rate Review Pro centralizes the end-to-end rate negotiation process by easily comparing hundreds of firms and rate cards side-by-side. Rate Review Pro stores all rates in one place and calculates the metrics that matter so you can negotiate with precision.

With Rate Review Pro, you can more easily answer questions like:

• Is this firm requesting an increase at the same clip as its peer group?
• How does the firm’s weighted average increase compare to others?
• How did negotiation conversations progress last year?

Let's take a look at how it works.

Setting up a request in Rate Review Pro

You can find Rate Review Pro directly on your home screen.

Standard Timkeepers

From there, drafting a request follows a very similar workflow as our core use cases. Clients will be able to include a summary and more information about the rate requests, including for specific currencies, areas of law, or jurisdictions that you want rate cards submitted. Rate cards are comparable and filterable by practice area and location so it’s important to consider instructing firms upfront about the level of granularity preferred (e.g. rate card by country or city/cities).

You will provide this level of insights into your draft summary on the request.

Also note, we’ve prebuilt timekeeper titles into the request template (see below) to make for easy selection or you can simply add your own custom titles.

Individual (Named) Timekeepers

Further, should clients prefer individual timekeepers, they have the option to toggle that on for firms to fill out. Upon selecting this toggle, clients can provide more information about what they’d like firms to provide, whether it’s Timekeeper ID, Graduation Year, or both.

For more in-depth information on Named Timekeepers, see this release page here.

From there, sending invites to firms works the same way as our traditional use cases, which brings us to the firm view.

Firm View

Based on the details provided in the summary section of your request, firms will have flexibility to create rate cards for different countries, practice areas, and even get granular down to the city or state level too.

Again, based on your input upfront, firms can toggle whether or not adding last year’s hours and current rates will be necessary for any rate card. We believe it’s important for clients to capture all of this information for stronger comparison and to provide more helpful calculations. So please instruct your firms to provide both current rates and last year's hours where possible.

Firms will also enter in standard rates and new proposed rates. Calculations like discount from standard or year-over-year change will be done in real-time.

If Individual Timekeepers is toggled on, firms will see two different tabs in this view. One for filling out Standard Timekeepers, the other for Individual Timekeepers.

Comparison View

As firms submit their rate cards, they will all be appear in one single view. This makes it incredibly easy for clients to understand how each firm is pricing their rates at the timekeeper level and the impact of the change.

• How much did each timekeeper go up or down from last year?
• What is the weighted-average change for a single firm across all of their timekeepers?

Clients can easily filter on this screen between Firms, Location, and Practice Area.

Rate Card Details View

From the comparison view, this is where clients can dive into each individual firm to see where their rate increases are having the biggest impact on cost.

For instance, clients may find that one timekeeper has a 10% increase but its total impact on spend isn’t that high. At the same time, a senior partner whose rate “only” went up by 3% will have a material impact on spend if hours worked remain constant year over year.

From this view, clients can red line the proposed increases by clicking the “Negotiate” button. Please note that there is no option to put these rates into an auction right now. The main cost reduction driver will come from red-lining via the “Negotiate” button.

In the Negotiate view, clients will have the opportunity to enter their counter-proposed rates along with their reasons for their counterproposal. Rate Review Pro will store all negotiation history and comments directly on each rate card so you'll always have a running log of all actions that took place leading up to agreed upon rates.

Rate Review Pro will automatically redline as you enter counter-proposed rates. It will also update calculations in real-time to show how your proposal reflects a new Discount from Standard Rate and overall Change from Last Year.

FAQs

For all Knowledge Center articles around Rate Review Pro, please see these links here for clients and firms, respectively.

How does this compare to what was available for Rate Negotiations previously on PERSUIT?

• Collecting more rates other than proposed rate (Standard rate, Current rate, Last Year Hours)
• New calculations: Percentage discount from standard, average rate, weighted average rate
• Spend impact (calculation to show total effect of increase)
• Visualize rates in a more intuitive way (new comparison table)
• Filter firms for easy comparison (e.g. Filter further to compare 4 or 5 peer firms all in the same view)
• Drill down into country or city and state
• No need to define the 'rate cards' you want; just rely on firms to provide the rates they have for the areas they do the work

All in, this is a far more comprehensive, smarter, and efficient product than anything we’ve ever offered on rate reviews.

Will I need to proactively send out requests for rate increases from my firms? Is that counter-intuitively prompting my law firms for a rate increase?

In most cases, using Rate Review Pro proactively with your firms is a useful way to simply get ahead of the inevitable and take control of the conversation around rate increases.

Rate Review Pro was built to be used both proactively and reactively with outside firms - it just really depends on the circumstance and expectations. For example, if you have a known panel who will inevitably send through their increased rates at a typically known time, there is no harm and only massive efficiencies to gain in proactively using Rate Review Pro to request the new rates from those firms all at once. From there, if you have other firms who are, perhaps, used a bit more sparingly, you can use the module reactively and send the request for rates through PERSUIT once notified about the rate increase.

Can I specify which types of rates I want firms to provide?

For V1.0, clients do not get to specify which types of rates they wish to collect from firms.

All firms will be required to provide as mandatory:

• • New standard rate (”Rack rate”)
  • Proposed rate

Can a firm include value adds or volume discounts?

If they do want to include any additional details on the rate card such as value adds or volume discounts, this can be included in the rate card’s ‘Assumptions and description’. There is no ‘value adds’ field.