I recorded my life in six minute increments for more than twenty years. First as a junior associate in the biggest of Big Law in New York, through several years with a single law partner, most recently as a partner at a mid-size firm. Just like many of the lawyers I’ve worked with over the years, and those I’ve met in the early days of Feehive, I was often forced to justify the time I spent on a task rather than the experience I brought to my work or the results I delivered for my clients. I’ve always loved practicing law but the business of law--driven by the recurring sense that I was in an adversarial relationship with my client around fees--sometimes sapped my energy for a profession that demands complete devotion.I first conceived of what has become Feehive to address a significant daily pain point in the billable hour model: creating budgets and fee estimates for clients. Clients understandably ask for budgets and estimates because without basic financial forecasts they typically have no idea what it will cost to solve their legal problem. But I hate creating them. I typically start by hunting around through a jumble of old Word documents to find budgets I prepared for other matters. Maybe, in the most sophisticated analysis, I’ll find a reference to a spreadsheet and I’ll go hunt for that too. I rarely go back to check on how accurate the earlier budgets actually were. If anyone else did, they didn’t leave a trace and their conclusions are almost certainly lost. Although I’m usually quick to collaborate with colleagues on substantive legal issues, I rarely do when it comes to creating budgets. It’s simply too cumbersome to find work others have done to budget for similar engagements. After all that, the deliverable to the client is generally disappointing. Neither the client nor the lawyers have much confidence that it will be accurate as the matter develops.I founded Feehive because I think we can do better. By delivering better budgeting tools today and predictive data analytics as we move forward.
We’ve just released the first version of the Feehive platform. Our system uses a highly intuitive, interactive interface to help lawyers quickly build a budget for a new matter. Word documents and spreadsheets are banished, replaced by simple sliders that automatically update numbers as you adjust the time investment in a particular task. The budgets you create can be easily saved and will be available to use as the starting point for the next budget you create for a similar matter. You can collaborate on budgets with colleagues. They can leave comments and propose changes.You can share the final budget with your client on the Feehive platform (showing only the data you define in advance) or you can provide them with a traditional document setting out the budget. Feehive will work better for you every time you use it. You can use one or more previous budgets to create a new budget and then make adjustments. You’ll be building your own proprietary database from the very start. Anyone can use Feehive immediately. I practiced law for a number of years in a two-lawyer firm. From my perspective, too much legal technology is focused on the very largest law firms. It is really important to me to deliver a platform that can be used by a solo practitioner or small firm. You don’t need IT staff to use Feehive and you don’t have to think about billing codes or “data hygiene.” Feehive is designed to be a huge improvement in the budgeting process the first time you log in. My immediate goal is to make a system that is so effective and easy to use that lawyers will volunteer to prepare a budget for every new engagement. The budget will help lawyers align with clients on fees, build client trust and add value to client relationships.
We’re already building data modeling tools into Feehive and we’ll be baking in more as we go forward. Some will be obvious from new features you’ll see, some will only run in the background. The result will be a tool that is even more efficient as more and more of your parameters are built out in advance. It will also become more accurate as we use data models to make better forecasts about the fees that will be incurred for a specific matter. I’ll be writing more about our approach to data modeling in later posts. More accurate fee forecasts will begin to loosen the grip of the billable hour model on the legal profession. The billable hour endures because it’s a convenient pricing system for lawyers and, surprisingly to me at least, for clients too. The advantage to lawyers is that the billable hour model places the burden of inefficiency on the client. For clients, the billable hour serves a metering function. They can see the hours and dollars piling up. One of the most interesting things I’ve learned during the early days of Feehive is that many clients are resistant to change because they believe that although the billable hour is a blunt instrument for monitoring legal work it’s better than no instrument at all. Fundamentally the billable hour model is a data failure. Lawyers and clients (who are also often lawyers themselves) see every legal engagement as a unique series of unpredictable events. They believe that it is impossible to price the work needed to address those events with any certainty. Data science reveals that there aren’t many unique events. If we can model enough legal matters we will see repeatable patterns in what seem to be the most chaotic events. Now that we can predict the path of hurricanes we should be able to predict how much a motion for summary judgment will cost. With advances in data analytics, particularly advances in finding patterns in smaller sets of unstructured data, I think we’ll soon be able to demonstrate that even the smallest law practices can benefit from data modeling to set accurate, transparent prices for their services that are not based on billable hours.
We’ll soon be able to build fee forecasts that are so accurate that lawyers will be able to price engagements based on prior fixed budgets rather than on billable hour costs. They will be able to adjust profitability without reference to a number of billable hours. They will also be able to evaluate lawyers based on the contributions they make to overall profitability rather than the number of hours they work. Clients will also have increasing confidence in fixed fee models and will be willing to let go of the billable hour metering function. Lawyers and clients will align on an evolved business model that works better for everyone.