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— or lack of metrics that would give us a clear idea of the tasks we perform and the resources required to perform them. The result, however, affects how our services are priced. Unable to explain exactly what value we add to a client's business, we are vulnerable to the kind of logic that "a lawyer is a lawyer is a lawyer so why pay more for one than for another?" This reasoning, of course, is as heretical as the belief all clients are the same. Secondly, good legal services cost money to provide. While certain clients may be well served by a sole practitioner, others require a larger structure. It is not clear a client that requires the support of a competition lawyer, a tax lawyer, and a litigator will necessarily be better off consulting a sole practitioner in each of these areas. A one-stop shop where the client can receive all this advice from colleagues who have the client's "bigger picture" in mind may indeed end up providing a more efficient solution to the client who does not have time to move from place to place searching for the missing pieces of its legal puzzle. Their time is also money. Cost of overhead in the larger structure, however, requires a certain fee structure. In addition to what is market, a fundamental question to be considered when pricing legal work is: how does a lawyer wish to practise? As a sole practitioner or surrounded by partners whose legal skills can be drawn upon to assist his or her clients? If the answer to this is in a partnership, then the next question is what overhead can the partnership bear in terms of occupancy costs, employees, technology investment, and partner draws? Typically, a partnership with routine work can afford less overhead since margins are lower than a firm that does exclusively high-end work for which price is no object. Unfortunately, there is very little of the latter work on the market and frequently, even in eat-what-you-kill partnerships, some of the margins made on the high-end files are absorbed by the losses generated by the files that were underpriced simply to get the work. It would be foolish in this environment to turn away work simply because it costs us too much to do it. Bidding reactively on files, however, with a view of landing the deal at any cost is also unwise. At a certain point revenue must cover expenses. A more pondered approach, albeit an approach with little short-term gain, would be to educate ourselves, so as to educate our clients, with respect to the value we add to files and the costs required to produce this work. In the meantime, an obvious short-term solution for a partnership that has both routine and high-end files — most of the partnerships out there — would be to introduce processes that enable a firm to handle a file at a price both the market and the firm's overhead will bear. Danielle Olofsson is a knowledge management lawyer at Dentons Canada LLP in charge of civil law. She has practised law in Montreal, Paris, and Stockholm and is a member of the Quebec and Paris bar associations. She can be reached at danielle.olofsson@dentons.com. COMING TO www.canadianlawyermag.com/canadianlawyer-tv/InHouse Canada's leading in-house counsel explore their challenges for the year ahead Robyn Collver Daniel Desjardins Canadian Tire January 27 Bombardier February 17 Simon Fish Leanne Geale BMO February 3 Shell Canada February 24 Audrey Mak March 3 OMERS February 10 VIEW 2014 InHouseViewBlakes_IH_Feb_14.indd 1 Our View 2014 panel offer their collective thoughts on the year ahead BROUGHT TO YOU BY www.CANADIAN L a w ye r m a g . c o m F e b r uary 2 14-01-09 19 PM 0 1 4 12:17

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