Instead of charging by the month or by the total percent billed, it'd be cool to charge a subset of the amount saved.
I've seen this work with other companies. For example, http://www.sourceconsulting.com/ which monitors FedEx and UPS bills for errors and refunds.
There's also a legal company in New York that courier companies use to fight all of their traffic tickets (which really add up). Whenever they lose the appeal, the legal company gets nothing, but if they win, the courier company pays something like half of the ticket price to the legal company. It really makes it a no-brainer to sign up.
Co-founder here. Charing a percent of savings is an interesting model. We approached customers with it and they pull back from it fairly quickly. It sets up a conflict of interest in that there is an incentive to reduce more than is appropriate. Our goal is not simply "less." We believe customers should pay what they owe, but not more.
We also believe that the relationship with your law firm is important. Just cutting a bill doesn't help that relationship.
Law firms have an incentive to support a product that makes billing more predictable. Right now, they engage in a lot of ad-hoc discounting and writing off of hours to meet ad-hoc budget targets, and at the end of the day clients don't pay a substantial fraction of their bills (15% or so industry-wide).
Say the general counsel at a F500 agrees with his outside counsel that a particular motion needs to be filed in a litigation. Right now, he has an idea in his head of how much it should cost, say $75k. Or he solicits an estimate from his outside counsel how much it should cost. But that company has probably filed hundreds of such motions in litigations over the years. There is a lot of data to be used to make better guesses. If the software says: this motion will cost $75k with a standard deviation of $15k, based on that company's history with similar firms, then the company benefits from predictability, and the firm benefits by having a realistic budget and some objective reference they can point to when the bill comes due and they ask: "please pay this in full."
I like your thinking! We believe that billing should be fixed, not just reduced.
We're starting on the side where we have the most experience and have been able to get the most traction. We see providing evidence-based billing as an important part of the move to flat fee billing (or alternative fee arrangement).
Our end goal is to fix the process. We want to make sure legal billing doesn't become the joke that is medical billing.
Thanks for the feedback. We have evaluated this type of pricing model, but past experiences in larger settings make it unattractive. Basically the incentive is to reach the threshold, and then scale back just a tad. We don't want to create a bad relationship with a company and a law firm, but we do want to make sure they are paying the right amount. Firms serve a great purpose, and they should be compensated; the correct amount.
I've seen this work with other companies. For example, http://www.sourceconsulting.com/ which monitors FedEx and UPS bills for errors and refunds.
There's also a legal company in New York that courier companies use to fight all of their traffic tickets (which really add up). Whenever they lose the appeal, the legal company gets nothing, but if they win, the courier company pays something like half of the ticket price to the legal company. It really makes it a no-brainer to sign up.