New schemes and technological adaptation

On Wednesday, March 3, CRC 89.1 Radio, through its Contexto 360 program on Facebook Live, spoke with our director Bernardo van der Laat about how the pandemic accelerated the process of change in the legal sector. Legal firms have been forced to explore traditional schemes for charging for their services like the billable hour. In addition to varying their traditional billing schemes, firms are also showing a greater openness towards the use of technology, incorporating tools such as artificial intelligence, in order to make their processes more efficient. Alternative Legal Service Providers, or ALSP, have played a vital role in driving this innovation process in the legal sector.

Regarding billing schemes, Bernardo van der Laat tells us that, legal firms have operated through the variable metric known as the billable hour, which consists of determining that the final cost that clients will pay will depend on the volume of work, the disadvantage is that it does not allow to project with certainty how much a certain process or case will cost. This has allowed the legal sector to evolve and segment its services by highly qualified work, carried out by specialists; counseling relationship, which is based primarily on interpersonal or trust relationships, attorney / client; and, low routine day-to-day work, which allows projecting the legal work flow during the year, among others.