Value Management

We focus on value by understanding each client’s needs, tailoring pricing models, sharing risk, managing budgets and streamlining workflows. The results are predictable costs and measurable savings.

And we’re also engaged with the Association for Corporate Counsel, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium and other organizations to share best practices industry wide.

Clients are noticing, naming us as one of the best law firms for developing and implementing alternative fee arrangements, according to a 2016 BTI survey.

Here’s what we promise our clients:

Listening to your needs

We are committed to investing the time required to develop a tailored fee arrangement and budget, beginning with a dialogue regarding your needs, priorities and preferences.

Flexibility

We don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. We have added creative elements to hourly-based arrangements, and have designed a vast array of alternative fee arrangements. We have on-the-field experience utilizing these models with hundreds of clients. More than half of our largest clients take advantage of an alternative arrangement for at least a portion of our services.

Professional Support

To ensure pricing and project management get the right focus, we have a dedicated team led by a former Fortune 1000 senior executive. Our team works closely with our clients to tailor fee arrangements, set budgets and avoid surprises. We help our partners and clients plan, monitor and manage each aspect of an engagement on schedule, within budget and at optimal quality. And we are deploying analytics to eliminate the black box around what it takes to deliver a legal outcome.

Project Management Excellence

We bring the right tools to the table, including budgeting tools, our CaseStream litigation management system, our Orrick Analytics services, and innovative staffing and solutions like our Global Employment and Equity Compensation service.

Staffing

We have the staffing available to deploy the right resource for every task. Sometimes that’s a partner-track associate. And sometimes it’s a career associate or project manager based at our Global Operations Center. Because we have all types of resources and workflow planning tools available in-house, we can disaggregate and reaggregate tasks seamlessly.

We know that our clients have built comprehensive, sophisticated in-house legal and compliance teams. Our goal is to earn your trust as an extension of your team – bringing additional skills, resources and market perspective where needed. This begins with listening – and then drawing on our resources to respond to your needs.

Illustrative Fee Arrangements

The following illustrates some of the fee arrangements that we regularly deploy.

• Hourly-based billing arrangements, including volume discounts, progressive rates/sequential discounts, caps and carries, collared rates, and blended rates.
• Fixed and capped fees for a wide variety of discrete transactional, litigation and counseling engagements, including mergers & acquisitions, capital market transactions, secured and unsecured financings, mediations, patent re-examinations, appeals, trademark, copyright and patent filings, and dozens of other areas.
• Fixed and capped fees for one or more phases of an engagement, with and without collars, and with and without success fees. For example, we handle most of our wage and hour litigation under a fixed fee by phase arrangement through class certification. Upon conclusion of the engagement, to the extent that our standard hourly fees are materially greater or less than the fixed fee, the overage or savings are split between us and our client based on preagreed percentages. Additionally, in the event of preagreed “successful outcomes,” we are entitled to one or more success bonuses.
• Retainer arrangements for a specific area of work or for a portfolio of work, including for general corporate work, public policy and regulatory management, general employment and antitrust counseling, trademark management, global employment and equity compensation management, and global corporate subsidiary maintenance, and for pools of similar transactions or related cases. For example, for a leading global financial institution we have been handling a portfolio of pending and potential new cases involving multibillion-dollar exposures stemming from the financial crisis for a single fixed fee, negotiated annually.
• A wide variety of success-oriented arrangements, including full and partial affirmative and defense contingency engagements. We have success-oriented arrangements in place for a wide variety of litigation, arbitration and appellate matters. For these we are paid a monthly fixed fee, a fixed fee in installments, or discounted hourly rates together with a success fee. The success fee may be tiered based on varying levels of success, tied to or capped at a percentage of our billed fees, or constitute a prenegotiated set figure.