Category Archives for "Pricing"

Time is money. Leverage it wisely.

By Michael Feit | Best Practices , Contract Negotiations , Pricing , White Papers

What leverage does your firm have going into contract negotiations?

Many firms wait until around three months prior for legal information contract expiration to come top of mind. However, if a firm can allocate more time for planning and evaluating its legal information resources’ value, the extra time creates a huge leverage for the firm. Firms that obtain market knowledge to compare their contract pricing, coupled with key metrics to assess contract resources’ value, will gain significant leverage in legal information contract negotiations.

Planning ahead with the right tools and knowledge is not only critical but absolutely necessary for success. Key leveraging points may include change in size of firm, ample time to make certain contracts co-terminus, firm-wide interest in the sole-provider option, usage and value of each legal information resource, to name a few. A multi-year plan allows one to know ahead of time what the firm’s goals are going into contract negotiations.

Feit Consulting’s latest report, Optimizing Legal Information Pricing, provides market intel to compare your firm’s contract pricing, as well as key leveraging points to utilize in your upcoming legal-information contract negotiation. This resource shares tactics to achieve optimization. It also shares how to optimize your legal-information pricing and terms with Lexis, Westlaw, Wolters Kluwer, BBNA, and other products.

Get ahead of the vendor’s strategy and timeline. Don’t wait to prepare. Optimizing Legal Information Pricing is a tool that will help your firm prepare in time with the essential leveraging tools to achieve success. Learn more here.

Is it smart to go co-terminus?

By Michael Feit | Contract Negotiations , Pricing , White Papers

This question comes up often. Most often the answer is yes. Making contracts co-terminus can be an excellent strategic tactic for contract comparisons and creating negotiation leverage. It can also be advantageous to have multiple products expire at the same time to simply better align resources. Having several products in play during a negotiation cycle typically allows the firms to strategically approach negotiations from multiple angles. Additionally, the more a firm is purchasing at one time from a vendor, the greater that firm’s purchasing power.

To make your firm co-terminus, you may need to extend existing contracts. But before extending, it is important to understand fully what the extension entails. What is the cost/benefit of extending? Make sure it is worthwhile based on your firm’s legal information strategy and cost ramifications.

Learn more about preparing for your upcoming legal information contract negotiations with Feit Consulting’s white paper, Optimizing Legal Information Pricing.

Beyond the Price

By Michael Feit | Budgeting , Contract Negotiations , Pricing

Often times, the focus in legal information contract negotiations is the contract price. Securing a great price for the service and product offered is great, but only if the service and product offered match the firm’s legal information needs.

The first and most important step in optimizing your firm’s legal information resources and budget is a library audit. Evaluating and assessing how often resources are utilized is a key indicator of value. As practice groups come and go, information needs change and new products come to market.

The library audit can be conducted in various ways: from a high-level comb-over to evaluating each specific resource. If the latter, this can be a time-intensive pay-off. If your firm has not conducted a library audit in the last three years, it is worthwhile to take the time to do so now. If you don’t have time, consider outsourcing this task.

Understanding the use/value of your firm’s resources is essential to optimizing your firm’s legal information resource budget. Feit Consulting has encountered clients paying for resources that offer little value and have little to no use. When asked, firms share, “It costs so little.”

Don’t become a victim of paying for products the firm doesn’t use or need. Feit Consulting’s latest report, Optimizing Legal Information Pricing shares detailed steps and processes for achieving optimal results in legal information contract negotiations. Learn more here.

New Customers Win! Old Customers…?

By Kate | Contract Negotiations , Pricing

If you love Nordstrom (or Target, Starbucks, etc.), being a loyal customer has lots of benefits. Retailing in the 21st century is over-saturated, so many similar brands create a bidding war for consumers. And loyal consumers win the most–discounts, perks, events, you name it–they all await the customer willing to channel more spending toward one brand.

That mentality is so ingrained, it’s easy to think it’s true with your legal information vendors. Sadly, it’s the opposite. Stick with Westlaw and/or Lexis long enough, and chances are you’ll be getting among the worst value.

In legal information, the best deals and offers are reserved for new customers. And who’s funding those great deals? Loyal customers like you.

The new customer is their preferred customer. Loyal customers just pay for it.

Value does not automatically increase 3-5% annually “just because”!

By Michael Feit | Contract Negotiations , Pricing , White Papers

Value does not automatically increase 3-5% annually for every product “just because”! To pay increases annually, it would be expected that the firm is receiving more value, content or features than the year before. Complacency or lack of diligence in managing information resources can have long-lasting unfavorable implications on both processes and costs, thereby hampering overall efficiency.

Feit Consulting’s Optimizing Legal Information Pricing shares steps for evaluating the value of your firm’s legal information resources, and arms decision makers with the necessary knowledge and leverage for negotiations. Feit Consulting’s benchmarks provide context for assessing the favorability of your contracts compared to the market.

Click here to learn more.

Legacy Contracts: The Challenges New Librarians Face

By Michael Feit | Contract Negotiations , Pricing , White Papers

One of the tougher situations a law librarian can encounter is accepting a new position at a law firm and immediately being faced with tight deadlines for negotiating online contract renewals. Legacy contracts are a conglomerate of past points of view regarding what the firm needed in terms of content and the cost the firm was willing to bear at the time of negotiation. The secretive nature of online pricing just adds to the dilemma faced by librarians in this position, because it is impossible to truly know if what is being offered is best in market pricing.

If your legacy contract pricing is way above market, reaching a reasonable benchmark in your current negotiation cycle can be difficult or impossible without any knowledge of market pricing. In many cases, even with market knowledge, it can take several negotiation cycles to achieve contracts closer to market rates.

Feit Consulting’s latest white paper, Optimizing Legal Information Pricing was designed as a valuable tool to guide and assist information professionals through the online contract negotiating process. By providing insight into market metrics for Lexis and Westlaw, along with other key legal information vendors, the report outlines best practices for a contract audit and provides a handy checklist of dos and don’ts for the negotiation process. With a future forecast of what to expect from online vendors, this white paper is an essential resource for preparing for negotiations and successfully navigating the negotiation process.

Click here for more information on this resource.