Discover the Best Lawyer Billing Format for Legal Practices

Lawyer billing format for Legal

so you're an attorney and you've decided to go out on your own now what you need a plan and you're not alone join expert host Adriana lerys and her distinguished guests on new solo tune in to the Lively conversation as they share insights and information about how to successfully run your Law Firm here on legal Talk Network hello and welcome to New solo on legal Talk network I'm Adriana lerys I'm a legal technology trainer and consultant normally based in Orlando Florida if you're a regular listener you know that I travel a lot of course my favorite city is New Orleans which I'll get to be in in a couple of days but today I'm in the great city of Omaha Nebraska I came to Omaha a couple days ago to speak at the solo small firm conference that Nebraska and Iowa were having together and I came to give a presentation and help Cleo at their Booth so Cleo is one of our sponsors that gives me a great opportunity to thank them not just for uh sending me to Nebraska but also for being a sponsor for new solo along with solo practice University so make sure you check both of those out I'd like to welcome Mary venac to today's episode hey Mary thanks Adriana for having me on the show Mary thanks for letting me into your home you're so sweet and nice um we're good friends we've been friends for a long time and when I told told you I was coming to Omaha and that you were going to be a speaker at the conference it was pretty coincidental you said oh stay with me we'll have some fun and we've had a really good couple of days had a really good time the conference location had a lot of great Poké stops so we were able to uh add a little to the legal part of the conference and fun Should we even confess that we may or may not have been out poke hunting till 10:30 and 11:00 at night for the past two nights across Omaha unfortunately I posted on on Facebook and social media so I've got a few messages like please tell us that you have not Fallen susceptible to that particular game but I have a lot of fun it is fun we've had a good time but the reason you were at the conference I mean I was there because I was helping Cleo out and I gave a presentation on practice management but you were there talking on two different topics one of which I specifically came um came up to you and said hey well you know we've got nothing else to do between poke hunts let's record a couple of podcasts I decided we're gonna have to break this up into two because the topic is not I wouldn't say it's complex but there's a lot to talk about and it's alternative fees it's one of your favorite things to talk about and teach other lawyers about so that's what you were doing at the soless small firm conference right that's right and exactly what is you know I feel like lawyers hear about it and read about it all the time but can you just quickly describe in case someone's still trying to grasp it or maybe they're new or maybe they're a new lawyer which they are this is kind of geared toward new Solos new lawyers but I know that we have a lot of other types of listeners but what is an alternative fee when it comes to thinking about um running a law practice an alternative fee generally is any fee any way of charging for a law firm's services that isn't actually the billable hours so the traditional way of charging is here's my rate and I'm going to charge you based on how many hours this takes me an alternative fee and there's several different types that we'll talk about is just any way of doing it that is other than the hours times the rate the billable hour is still how you figure out what your alternative fees are going to be at least on on some of the fee types but it's not just a hour times rate and here whatever the bill you get at the end of the month is going to be the cost key component of it is that we're going to be able to tell the client upfront this is what I'm going to charge you for the particular service that you're looking for and in your law practice which tell us real quick a little bit about you know what you do here in Omaha and the type of practice that you have you regularly include an alternative fee structor when you're working with your clients right so tell us what you do so my partner and I founded our firm several years ago and we broke off of a big firm and so we did a lot of thought on who and what we could serve when we came out of a bigger firm into a small firm environment and originally it was just the two of us starting this particular firm and what we wanted to be able to do was to be really clear about we're pretty efficient we're pretty technologically oriented you are and we wanted to benefit from that also as well as serve our clients a little bit different differently and one of the things that one of my business clients had told me early on is I just want to know how much stuff is going to cost me when I call you and so that's what we decided to wait were you shocked when a when a client said that to you or did you think well that makes perfect sense because as a consumer I always want to know whatever I'm going to be paying for I want to know the cost up front I mean whether it's my lawn guy or the dentist or you know another consultant were you shocked I mean because I feel like clients are often I mean my clients I should say which are the lawyers are often surprised to hear that maybe a client wants to know upfront what it's going to cost them for their services I think it is I don't know that I was shocked so much as I made a decision at that moment that that was it was more like wow that is really right because she gave me that same type of example that you just did she say if I go to the grocery store and I decide I want to buy craft macaroni and cheese or the store brand it tells me how much each option is going to cost and I can make a decision and it breaks it down by the ounce FYI right I mean like there's a micro cost there that I'm aware of and her point was look a well-run business looks at opportunities looks at costs and so in going into and it was actually a fairly big project that she was giving me and I remember at the time going oh I have no idea how to figure out what I'm going to charge for this project but I was talking to her about it saying well look I've got to look at this I've got to look at this and she said to me break that down into those pieces and at least but I need to know how much it's going to cost so I can make a good decision and as part of the fear which I'm going to guess that your answer is going to be is because I have the sphar as a consultant when I do Project based billing that you're either overpricing or underpricing it like there's it's just hard to figure out the exact right cost right it is hard but I think the biggest fear is that you're going to underprice of course and if you underprice and you're still looking at because the hourly it's a service business right so the fact of your hour is still going into figuring out how much you're going to charge and at the end of the day if you can get billable hour work you get 10 hours of work at your rate versus you've worked more hours than you quoted on this particular project then at some point you're essentially working for free nobody wants to work for free but there's some ways to resolve that in pricing as well that's why we have to with some of it some people will think that an alternative fee is just hey it's a flat fee that's not and you're locked in right but that's not right that's not what an alternative fee is you might use a flat fee for some really what I call the commodity type of service is somebody's forming a new business entity most of that what you know the parameters of the formation you can come up with the right and stick by it any additional services and that's one of the keys in developing flat fee models is that okay if I'm going to do an entity formation it's going to be you know we charge 650 plus costs for basically a fairly simple formation and that's actually you know price competitive with legalism for its full service entity formation but we're really clear about what we provide for that particular cost and we're really clear that if there's additional or different services that the client needs we're going to quote those differently and you would communicate with them obviously it's not like a bill is going to show up with these additional costs you would call them up and communicate and say you know based on what we talked about when when we took on this relationship there's these extra charges that or these changes in the charges I think that communication piece is the most important part of the process and for whatever other reason the most challenging part forers to take I think for all of us but yeah definitely for lawyers but I've gotten where I'm just realized how important that conversation is so I at the very first meeting with a client I never let a client walk out of my office where we haven't talked about what it's going to cost and if I can't give them the cost at that moment in time which is sometimes the case I at least tell them how we're going to figure that out and when they're going to hear from me and I am going to give them a cost before I have them sign an engagement letter I'm at least going to give them a range I'm going to give them something that knows and I also in that what I'm really proactive about is watching what is actually being consumed in terms of time and what's going on with the project so that if there is a change and there is sometimes you have in the estate planning World which I do a fair amount of work in there is a lot of times it's a huge process for people in terms of they might be estrange from a child or they might you might not have kids and it's what do you want to do with your wealth if you don't have kids those are all big decisions and people change their mind in the the process so we usually say on that process with a trust document this is the trust that we're going to draft for you and we include in that cost it's going to be we're going to send you a draft and one set of revisions and as long as that's the process this is the cost if there's a second set of revisions that was our fault then that's going to be included in the cost but if it's because the client changed their mind at that point it's going to be their cost but what we do as soon as that begins to happen is we communicate with them about you know this is the cost is going to be different and we make that clear up front exactly what we're going to cover so that it shouldn't be a big surprise and your firm before we go any further I don't want to forget to ask you is how big and how many lawyers do you have tell us a little bit about your practice because you mentioned um business formation you me mentioned um wealth planning but I know that you also do very cool work with gun trust and and gun loss I want to make sure that we say that about you because that's so cool the gun trust is kind of a fun area and and being in Nebraska it's really a pretty easy area to practice in because just about everybody seems to own guns in Nebraska but as a generality Mark and I my partner and unfortunately my partner is taking an in-house position with one of our clients so he won't be here anymore and I'm really sad about that but we founded the firm with just the two of us and at the time it was going to be the two of us and we were going to live happily ever after our laptops 12 years ago and we started our firm in the for field in the basement of a building out in the for field that's awesome and we were going to be there and and then one of our former partners decided to join us so we ended up running a real office and then we promptly grew to 15 lawyers at that point in time and we started looking at each other going okay I thought we left a bigger firm to be little light and lean that's when the economy went South and B attrition and whatever we were back down to four or five we've stayed right now we're nine with Mark's departure we'll be back to 8 which is more than plenty for me but what we did was created a tax and business Boutique so she said well who and what can we serve if we want to stay small we don't really want to become a big firm again so we decided we could serve the people who are forming businesses and the second piece of it was I'd been at a law firm where they focused on invading relationships I didn't want to invade relationships I wanted to build relationships that doesn't sound that great it was I used to anytime the word invasion is used it can't be good I used to turn onto the street going to my really fancy office and get a stomach ache when I was heading there and they're a great Law Firm actually it just wasn't my style and that's what I was tell you it's got to be your style but so what we decided is that a great opportunity would be to help people start businesses you were helping them hopefully fulfill their dreams it doesn't always work out that way but we've had a lot of really amazing success stories but I'm a tax attorney by day and Mark was business and transactional so we brought together those skills and that's who we decided to serve and it's been a really fun run but I personally either do or oversee at this point the gun trust type of thing I do pet truss is another little area that I have I do a lot of work in the artificial reproductive technology so one of my clients daughter got a brain tumor and what they did is they harvest and froze her eggs because she hadn't any children yet so things like that very I kind of consider those within the estate planning area I do a lot of business succession planning I also do a lot of work for Real Estate developers so I get to a lot of times have clients setting up you know real estate type Investments and projects I represent some guys that I've helped them create holding companies to organize their investment structure or business structure and that's fun as well so you have a really broad range sort of okay of services right it and is there any one of those practice areas that you can't have an alternative fee option within I have the alternative fees with everything I do so it might be in some cases especially like say when I took a client and they had 30 baby project entities with various businesses in them and we organize them into a couple holding companies that's a really hard one to say it's going to cost you xll but what I can always do is break that project down into parts and price the project by Parts which the client's usually happier with instead of seeing hey the Fe for this is going to be this huge ginormous amount by the way I'm going to create this holding company for you and move all the projects into here it's going to cost you this giant amount of money it's a little more palatable if I break it down and say well look we're going to need to form the following new entities and the cost per each of these entities is going to be a certain dollar amount and the research we're going to have to do in a few States because you're in some different states or we might have to contact an attorney there it's going to cost this amount so you break it down into the parts they can see the parts they can see the process and they're a little happier to get that but at the end of the day there is a bottom line it might be a range rather commit to a maximum amount and in our second episode part two of this cuz we had to break it into two cuz there's so much good information you actually have a six I'm going to call it your simple six-step process and we'll go through figuring out sort of how to break that down and what those ranges are so you and I had a funny exchange at the solo small firm conference actually I was like the fly on the wall with another attorney we were sitting at a reception and the two of you happen to do the same type of work but I don't even know if when you started the discussion about alternative fees if he knew that you guys did the same type of work so I think the discussion started and he said well I can't do flat fee or alternative fees because my work is very customized and I watched you almost stroke out right because I knew that you were going to say hardly dude you know so what tell us a little bit about that typical exchange you have with lawyers with them saying well my work is very customized there's no way I could ever do this you know what do you say to them what did you say to him I don't remember exactly what I said to him I think I was busy stroking trying to recover from stroking out but that's one of the most common things that I do hear from clients in any practice area for me in my practice area was particularly compelling I'd admit that the first time I had a litigator say that to me well I don't litigate but what I did with that litigator was challenged him well let's sit down and talk about that cuz I don't do what you do but this particular case is and I use that in my presentation the next day as an example they said okay so the really common thing and I think that attorneys keep themselves from benefiting from the advantages of alternative fees which there's huge advantages and I think that's one of the misconceptions that that you talked about is that and that was one of the questions I had for you too is what are the misconceptions and or the perceptions that either clients or attorneys have and I think that's that's probably the biggest one right that is the biggest misconception right I can't quote this cuz it's too complicated and so my challenge to anybody who makes that statement is you know what let's talk about that let's really look at what you do so I do a lot of complex Estate Planning and at the end of the day there's certain pieces of that process that are the same and we're going to talk about that more detail in the next podcast but to me as a generality even within the complex areas that I do there might still be 10 different paths I'm going to take people down and I can look at each of those and say okay but it's a matter of breaking that complex project down and my challenge to any attorney who says to me well look I can't possibly quote that is well have you ever done it before right done it before then you should be clear that there's a process and you should break that process into pieces and then price the pieces of the process and the same gentleman because I did address that specifically in the presentation came up to me and talked to me afterwards and asked me to come over and help them out a little bit with that and I will follow up with them because I think one that clients are happier if they know what they're going to pay and secondly I think that you know personally a lot of people will ask me well what were the market forces driving the use of alternative fees Mary like well you know what right now if you're in high-end work you can probably get your rate times your hour my response to that is who cares I want my rate plus times my hour if I can earn that and if I can be really why should I not get the benefit of being super efficient and super organized and using technology so if attorney a is charging hour times rate and he blunders through using cut and paste strategies to create documents and I instead of automated my entire library of forms at the end of the day I'm going to have a lot less hours than attorney a I should be able to make more than attorney a I should be able to charge the Le and I'm sure you do and I do and what we do as we get more and more automated is we usually give the client a break but we keep some of that that's why we don't use the hours we're like if we know what others are charging and we keep close tabs on that and pay attention to what people are being charged for similar types of services then we try and make sure we're competitive with those or giving clients a little bit better deal and if we're making good money or you know we're making a little bit essentially a premium rate with the alternative fees we're good with that well that all sounds good listen before we move on to our next segment we're going to take a quick break to hear a message from our sponsors Cleo is an valuable software solution for law firms of all sizes handling all the demands of your growing practice from a single cloud-based platform Cleo enhances your firm with features such as matter and document management time tracking and even billing Cleo is an effortless tool that helps lawyers focus on what they do best practice law learn more at cleo.com that's c l io.com ready to create and build your own Solo or small firm practice need a nuts and bolts education on the 360 degree experience of starting a business there is only one online destination dedicated to helping you achieve your goals solo practice University the only online educational and professional networking Community dedicated to lawyers and law students who want to go into practice for themselves more than 1,000 classes 58 faculty and mentors tours what are you waiting for check out solo practice university.com today okay welcome back to New solo I'm Adrian lerys and I'm in Omaha Nebraska with a dear friend and a very smart lawyer and businesswoman Mary venac before a break we were just sort of talking about what is an alternative fee you know the misperceptions and and uh perceptions for clients as far as figuring out how that works and Mary what I wanted to talk about now in the second half are is there only one type of alternative fee are there different types when somebody says I don't even know where to start do you have to start with figuring out which type of alternative fee there is or what are a couple of your favorites that's a really useful process because I think that there's a misperception there in that the flat fee again means I can assign exact dollar amount to every project and we've already talked about the fact that that doesn't always work one of the simple easy ones that we do use for what I call our commodity service is a flat fee and we've designed that in a variety of ways so you know if it's your oh so wait so I keep using flat fee an alternative interchangeably they're not but they're not okay why didn't you correct me so correct me now so an alternative fee generally refers to anyway that we're compensating other than the hourly rate a flat fee is hey I'm going to do a simple will and I'm going to charge you $350 for that simple will I'm going to do a healthcare power of attorney and I'm going to charge $100 for that one of the other ways that we use flat fees that I think is pretty creative and it works extremely well so people we get regular calls for somebody to review a contract and what we'll do is that's one of the ones it actually is somewhat hard so we have come up with a set rate for types of contracts I for example review a lot of physician employ ment contracts and what we do is say this is what we'll do we will review the contract and we will provide you comments and those comments are going to include here are key things just to know about signing a contract like this but you're not going to be able to negotiate them here are your deal breaker items and here's what we suggest you have them done and here's some other stuff to just be aware of like make sure you request if you have to be on staff at a hospital make sure you get whatever the rules of those are and what we do is we say we're going to do that for certain dollar amount and we do that we provide them the comments and we let them know and then if you want us to be involved in the negotiation process we're going to quote that additionally and what happens with that is it's a great service and we do that for almost any type of contract is that we have the fee might be slightly different based on the type of contract but that works really well and from that a lot of times they'll come back and not a lot of times actually a lot of times that is all they need but sometimes somebody comes back and they need some additional service we also use that as as an opportunity to create a relationship with the client so say that new physician Market I get a lot of those type of referrals we do those contracts all the time but we also send them a whole bunch of information about starting your career as a physician here's things you should know this is what you're likely to run into by the way you know here's things to think about as far as how you're getting compensated did you just get married have some young kids here's some things to think about in estate planning asset protection is really big for Physicians actually that's really big for a lot of people so we also use that as an opportunity excellent and we know that that's part of our cost so that's your flat fee there's the percentage fee which is based on the an amount so common percentage type fees in Iowa we were talking to the Iowa lawyers they charge 2% for probate so it's like no matter what the size of the probate and it was an interesting conversation because 2% of a really large estate right versus a really small estate the same steps are involved in some cases you can have a really simple large estate and a really complex small estate but that's still the tradition a lot of times the other places we see a percentage fee is in real estate and m&a transactions sometimes it's a percentage of the transaction cost you run into the same types of issues a small transaction can take just as much work which is sometimes why you do combination fees the other thing I call that's an alternative fee is still a fee range it is based on the hourly rate or it can be based on some other ways but you're coming up with a minimum and maximum so that goes back to our conversation early on where the client wants to know what is it going to cost where is it going to be so and the range might be you might have to give a range for pieces of the projects the other one you see is Fe caps is like the maximum amount I'm going to charge you for this is not one of my favorites because that's where if you do the under quoting then you end up all of a sudden you know when you've hit the number of hours you quoted and you'd much prefer to go golfing or to go hunting or something other than continuing to work on a project for free we should Golf and poke hunt at the same time we could Golf and Pokey hunt at the same time let's do that I'm all I'm I'm in yeah that would be so fun there's the Blended hourly rate and that is where it's mostly you see that in large firms and so they'll charge the same rate doesn't matter who the provider is and I'll acknowledge there was a gentleman in my presentation who said to me well I still think you're doing something wrong with your fees and what he said to me was I should be using the same rate to calculate my overall charges for my paralal as I use for myself and I looked at him I'm like what on What planet well he had a good point he goes didn't you automate your trust document so does it really take any difference in terms of the time consumption for her to run that automated oh okay wait wait right what that guy said to you the other night right right and I have to tell you I'm I'm going to rethink and that's one of the great things about talking at the seminars because you do so I'll rethink of he's got a point particularly when I'm looking at the reasonableness of my fees from an ethical perspective yeah that was funny with you sorry I didn't process it because you said that happened during the seminar but it was when we were out to dinner and it was funny because you and I were driving home afterwards and it was such a simple question that he asked you and you were almost like astounded that you hadn't thought of it right and it right but I just I think that goes to show you that even with someone who spends as much time as they do figuring out how to run an efficient business talking to other people and just having an open mind about other ideas can sometimes really you know something will snap and you go yeah all right so I like that go on right and that's what I find extremely beneficial I'm there pres and every time I've done it that's been what's happened is somebody there and this you know as somebody who's been around for a long time right yeah kind of knows our business it's huge well that's I'm a I grew up at playing team sports and whether it's a teammate who works with me or it's somebody who's just in my profession I think the more we can exchange information with each other the better we do as an industry overall so then there's the task base fee which is a variation of what we talked about as the flat fee and this is one of the ones that I use a lot and it's the complex planning question so that's when we had that conversation about oh it's too hard I do these really complex things I can't possibly do it well you just break it down so if I'm doing a really complicated transaction I break it down into its components and I price each piece it's like I'm going to charge this many dollars for forming that entity I'm going to form charge this many dollars for the registration in another state I'm going to charge this many dollars for registering the 10 trademarks that you're going to need so those are the task-based fees that might be a part of the bigger project and maybe a lot of times attorneys haven't thought about really dissecting and constructing what a process on a matter takes and that's where that's helpful right to actually sit there and go okay well here's I have to do a before I do be I mean I think a lot of times we just go into almost any project that we can do with our eyes closed and we just start doing it without really realizing that there's a series of tasks or projects or or functions that are involved so doing that probably not only helps the client see the different rates but it also helps you figure out what those different activities are that help you complete that matter or close that matter right right I think what happens is if you're blessed to be really busy it's really easy just you have a phone call you got to get this out the door sometimes it's been sitting on your credens you have so you just jump in and do it it's the forest for the trees problem I mean it's hard to realize that there's a bunch of individual trees that make up that whole Forest till somebody says well break it down walk in there and that's right you really have to kind of decide to do that because I that's one way to function yeah and I just made a decision early on that was really my goal to to do better than what you know I went through three large firms early in my career and what I watched is okay there's a cap in rates at least in this market so at some point you're going to only be able to charge no matter how much experience no matter how much knowledge you have there is a rate cap for certain types of work and as you get older in your career you might want to work a little less yeah and so all of a sudden you're stuck you can't raise your rate you want to work Less hours you'd really like not to have your income go down at that point when you have all this experience so what happens and that was what I saw in some of the large firms if you're totally stuck in ours terms rate and then you're possibly paying Associates more than their Worth to hire the top Associates well then where does it come it comes out of the people in the middle and then you have in some of the larger law firms all this constant transition in the middle which makes it kind of hard in terms of firm relationships and things like that so I wanted to try and beat that quite honestly plus I think it's hard to get metrics and true statistics when there's that much sort of flux and fluctuation in a law firm but if you can figure out a system that allows you to consistently get back Financial feedback you're going to end up being better off in the end and figuring out how to use some of these alternative fee structures a little bit easier do you have any more you want to Rattle off I do have another one I'd like to talk about is what we call the availability retainer and a lot of firms use different variations of it but the one so we're always thinking when we're charging fees fees and what you charge charge are also marketing and I know people really struggle with that cuz they but the presentation of the bill and how we charge is a big indicator of whether you're going to keep the client whe they're going to call you back so my goal has always been that my clients are annuities rather than how much can I recover on this project and part of that was one firm that I worked at it was always about how much can we make on this project and if the client never called them back again because they've been charged so much they didn't care so in my world it's like well how can we make both of those things work because gee we all know that our best return business is a client that's already found us as opposed to throwing all kinds of time and energy that we don't have into going and chasing new clients so I've always thought in some law firms they focus on paying more to people who bring in new clients I'm like why don't you pay more to those who really figure out how to keep and evolve the relationship and the work for the clients you already have such a basic business principle that so many law firms cannot grasp it's just astonishing to me and hugely important so one of the ways we do that is with this avalability retainers so we do is again we targeted helping clients start new businesses and what happens with those clients is a lot of times they're new business owners sometimes they're repeat business owners but they haven't dealt with all the issues so what we know is that when they first start that business they're going to run into a whole bunch of stuff but they also are on a budget sure and so if they start to call call us and they start to get these huge bills then they're going to freak out and then they don't call us on the stuff that really matters so what we tell clients and that's one of the areas there's several and we do this in is a new business client here's the deal we're going to build into your entity formation or something else that we do for them a certain amount of you can call us for 6 months with anything that comes up and there's going to be no additional charges and then 6 months from now we're going to sit down and we're going to figure out what kind of stuff you're running into what you're on needs are and then we'll build you a monthly cost so that you have a budget and then you can call us as many times as you need to for that flat monthly amount and we'll readjust that once a year and we'll sit down and talk about it we do that also in the human resource area so we have clients that have one employee and we have clients that have thousands of employees so the pricing is not the same across the board but we have what happens in the bigger entity with the Thousand employees is they have it's very rarely the owner of the business that's dealing with with the employment issues and if you have somebody who's not paying the bill who's making the phone call to our Law Firm the bills going to get really big owners then sees the bill like what the heck so what we do is say look we kind of get how that's going on and we want you to be able to have your HR needs met so here's a flat monthly amount and you can call all you want and same thing will re-evaluate that cost that's been a really effective strategy it gives the law firm a regular recurring income stream it's like a membership fee to a Massage Envy and um you know if I don't use it one month I'm able to double up the next month exactly right exactly right I hate to dumb it down to something so simple but a great that's what you're describing to me that's interesting and well and not that it's new or novel or but I mean it's just so refreshing to hear a law firm actually thinking about these alternative ways of billing but that recurring income must be very welcome when things slow down like you know I know your football season's about to start here people probably aren't thinking about their legal needs you know you're ready for those Huskers to finally do something this year right they're still hoping Great White Hope what else you got so the other one that's worth mentioning is just the use of success fees and those vary a lot by practice area so some criminal law cases they'll use a success fee hey if we manage to do this for you there will be a success fee we use them we do a lot with the Internal Revenue Service so somebody comes in with a you know huge tax bill and we'll quote them a flat fee for the process and a success fee if we actually manage to settle your 100,000 liability for 1,000 bucks we're going to also you you're going to pay us a success fee so the success fees using those successfully is designing them in a way that the client is going to be find them like yeah they're happy to write you a check if you just save them $100,000 this is no problem and you make your flat fee or your base fee is a little bit less to start so that if you lose so it's not a pure contingency type fee it's almost like a sort of contingency fee but not entirely because you're still getting PA creatively contingent and so yeah so the true contingency fee is if you don't get anything done you don't get paid well we're not going to put somebody through an offer and compromise process without having it's not the nature of our structure so we might have a fee for that process that's lower than our rly rates would come out to be but most of the time we've actually been very successful in that area so most of the time we do really well and you have a lot of happy clients who don't mind because they just got a notice from the IRS that yep sorry your 100 Grand bill has been forgiven for a th000 or something like that yeah if they get the oops and if we had that happen very often we'd have to re-evaluate whether we wanted to use that kind of fee so that's you have to look at the practice and say does this make sense for what I do so the one other type of fee and this one's actually newer to me so I don't know the details of it but it's worthy of mention and so it's the structured fee it only works for those who do truly contingent fees which I don't do a lot of but why the reason that the strategy appealed to me is because it's a tax deferral so if you're a personal injury lawyer doing work comp or employment discrimination things where you're getting paid contingency you can as part of the settlement agreement negotiate that your fees are going to get paid essentially to a life insurance company who will provide you an annuity what the aspect of that that I find really interesting is that if you get a million dollar fee one year typically you're paying income tax on that entire fee and you might then go two or three years without having great income this levels that into annuity payment so it levels out your income for income tax purposes and for budgeting purpose if that helps as well that's very again creative and interesting your CPA brain must really like that one I do like I do like I always like any tax deferral strategy so even though I don't do that I saw your eyes light up when you said tax deferral right yeah pathetic I know but it's my deal okay well we're going to just end here because it seems like a good stopping point you've given everyone a wealth of information to listen to and consider so we're going to stop here but we're going to bring you right back for another episode and we're going to talk in the next episode about the exact steps and some ideas that you have for helping people figure out what type of alternative fee they might like of all those ones that we just mentioned and also what I like to call your your Mary's simple six-step process to moving to an alternative fee structure and um before I do that though let everybody know how they can get a hold of you maybe get a copy of your PowerPoint that we've been sort of flipping through to guide through this conversation I think you have a wealth of information just in that PowerPoint alone and I'd be happy to provide the PowerPoint or just have a discussion with anybody who has an interest in the topic my email is the easiest way to get a hold of me which is M venac van.com and so that's m is in Mary VA n is in new d n is in new a k at VA nwi.com and if you lose track of that but remember my name you can Google me I think I'm the only Mary vinac that's in the country actually I think I have a cousin in Green Bay but I pop up on the Internet when you put my name in so you can connect to me through Linkedin or any other form that works for you well that's great so we're going to end the show I'm Adriana lerys thank you for listening hope you pop back in for uh episode number two of this great conversation with Mary venac of Omaha Nebraska about alternative fees make sure you visit our sponsors Cleo and solo practice University join us next time for another great episode of new solo thanks for listening to new solo with host Adriana lerys tune in again to learn more about how to successfully run your new practice solo here on legal Talk network the views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of nor are they endorsed by legal Talk Network its officers directors employees agents Representatives shareholders and subsidiaries none of the content should be considered legal advice as always consult a lawyer