The Mattern & Associates 2010 Cost Recovery Survey Benchmarking Report Has Arrived!
Do you know what percentage of Firms with between 100-149 Attorneys charge for scans in the Southeastern United States?
Or which high profile chargebacks clients are now objecting to - and what can you do about it?
Well, now we know, and so do eighty-one of your fellow law firms that participated in the survey. And we want you to know, too!
The Mattern & Associates 2010 Cost Recovery Benchmarking Report is here and ready to be distributed. If you participated in this study you will be contacted shortly to receive your login and password to this web-based report and to arrange a time to review the report with a Consultant from Mattern & Associates.
If you did not participate and would like to receive a summary of the report and/or participate in the 2012 study please contact Maria Herron at mherron@matternassoc.com. Also stay tuned for an announcement of a webinar summarizing the results in late December 2010/early January 2011.
The Time has Come for Mattern Plan B Cost Recovery™
Today Mattern & Associates issued a press release announcing our filing of a patent for the Mattern Plan B Cost Recovery™ method. We truly believe that this process, in which we structure your on-site support services as a hard cost pass-through increasing the realization of your billable cost recovery revenue, will be the future of cost recovery in the legal environment. In every situation where we have analyzed our client’s cost recovery situation, the implementation of Plan B would have had a significant impact on the realization of their billable revenue. If you would like to learn more about Mattern Plan B Cost Recovery, please visit http://www.matternassoc.com/services_cost.html.
Rob Mattern
Soft Cost Recovery: What is the Future in the “New” Economy?
Published by Robert C. Mattern in the ALA New York City Chapter Magazine September/October issue - Pages 20-23 (link to article below)
The practice of soft cost recovery in the legal environment is under intense scrutiny. As clients are increasingly pushing back on soft cost charges and partners are reluctant to charge anything “extra,” now is the time to take a fresh look at cost recovery practices.
More than 50% of firms have still not fully integrated into the print and scan issues of cost recovery, which leaves them with a declining revenue stream and increases the impact on their overhead. Copies and faxes are not nearly as standard in legal workflow as in the past, but cost recovery programs have not been updated to reflect this shift, to their own detriment.
Click here to read the full article:
Isn’t it Time for a Change?
In a preliminary review of the 2010 Mattern & Associates, LLC Cost Recovery Survey, the average net realization on billable items (the amount the firm actually gets paid for after internal and client write-offs) is below 50%. In other words, the firm is only getting reimbursed for less than 50% of what they are billing their clients on soft cost items. If you factor in the non-billable amount, this amount decreases to 33%. What does this data tell us? That the traditional method of cost recovery, and support services as we know it in law firms today, is dying.
As Einstein said about insanity, it is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results – isn’t that that what we are doing with cost recovery and the support services?
Realizing Your Realization
For many years, firms have tried to retain duplicating, print and scan work on-site. One of the reasons for this was to maximize recovery revenue. The reasoning went something like this: “we are paying for this equipment and people to run it, and we have a mechanism in place to capture these costs and charge them back to our clients.” Firms would focus on driving billable volume, thus maximizing recovery.
But recovery is not measured in billable volume alone. Firms need to look at their “realization.” In its simplest terms, “realization” refers to the amount a firm actually received from a client for these recoverable charges compared to the total amount of available recoverable charges. Looking at increasing utilization of “billable” client matter numbers is only one part of the equation. If your attorneys and/or clients are writing off the charges, your overall recovery will suffer.
Mattern offers a wide variety of traditional and alternative cost recovery strategies designed to maximize not only your billable volumes, but more importantly, your realization percentages. Call or email for more information.
