Gideon Grunfeld: Navigating Pricing, Psychology, and Strategy in Legal Practice

In this episode, Steve Fretzin and Gideon Grunfeld discuss:

• Strategies for pricing legal services effectively
• Overcoming psychological barriers to fee adjustments in legal practice
• The importance of tailoring legal service models
• Leveraging emotional connections and effective communication in client relationships

Key Takeaways:

• Lawyers often undercharge because they fear client objections, but raising rates with new clients or incrementally testing higher fees with existing clients can result in fairer compensation.
• Time is not always the best proxy for value in legal services; using flat fees or value-based pricing can align better with the real impact of a lawyer’s work.
• Approaching legal service delivery as a relationship rather than a transaction allows lawyers to justify higher fees by emphasizing guidance, expertise, and emotional support.
• A subscription model can be a game-changer for repetitive, high-volume work, such as employment law, offering consistent engagement and client satisfaction.

“The value you’re providing has very little to do with the time you’re putting in. In fact, if you can make it go away really fast, the client values it even more. So, do not charge by the hour.” —  Gideon Grunfeld

Got a challenge growing your law practice? Email me at steve@fretzin.com with your toughest question, and I’ll answer it live on the show—anonymously, just using your first name!

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Episode References: 

Huberman Lab Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110

About Gideon Grunfeld: Gideon Grunfeld was, for almost ten years, a large law firm business litigator and an antitrust attorney. As the president and founder of Rainmaking For Lawyers, he has since 2004 consulted with law firms and coached individual partners, of counsel, and associates to grow their book of business. In this capacity, he has helped thousands of lawyers increase their initial retainers, raise their hourly rates and flat fees, communicate their fees to clients, and increase their collections.

Connect with Gideon Grunfeld: 

Website: https://rainmakingforlawyers.com/

Email: gideon@rainmakingforlawyers.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ggrunfeld/

Connect with Steve Fretzin:

LinkedIn: Steve Fretzin

Twitter: @stevefretzin

Instagram: @fretzinsteve

Facebook: Fretzin, Inc.

Website: Fretzin.com

Email: Steve@Fretzin.com

Book: Legal Business Development Isn’t Rocket Science and more!

YouTube: Steve Fretzin

Call Steve directly at 847-602-6911

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You’re the expert. Your podcast will prove it.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Steve Fretzin: [00:00:00] Hey everybody, before we get to the interview, want to answer one of our questions. This one’s coming from Don from New York City. He asks, I’m one of the chief rainmakers at my firm. How do I sell myself, but not do all the billing? Well, that’s not an unusual request in question. Don, a couple of things.

Number one is if you’re at a full service firm, one of the best ways to grow business and continue to develop it and not have to do all the work is to cross sell, right? So cross market. So, you know, what else can you sell at your firm that isn’t relying on you or you and your billable hours to do it?

The other is to really consider a team approach. If you’re the chief rainmaker, you need to be out making it rain. And so every billable hour that you do, maybe over 500 to a thousand, that’s time that should be spent on the field, making it rain. And Really should be delegating a lot more than maybe you already are.

So I would consider a team approach where you talk about the team and talk about how amazing your team is and really sell the firm and sell the team. You’re going to still be the quarterback of the team, but ultimately you need to be in a position to delegate things down so you could [00:01:00] stay on the field.

Making it rain. So hopefully that’s helpful to everybody and to Don. That’s all I have for this Q& A for the of the show Everybody enjoy the interview. I know you’re going to love it

Narrator: You’re listening to be that lawyer life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice Each episode your host author and lawyer coach steve Fretzin Will take a deeper dive helping you grow your law practice in less time with greater results Now here’s your host steve Fretzin

Steve Fretzin: Hey everybody Welcome back to the, be that lawyer with Fretzin podcast.

I am so thrilled that you’re with us today. Twice a week, every week for the last five years, we’ve been bringing you this show to help you be that lawyer, confident, organized, and a skilled rainmaker. So buckle up. That’s what you’re in for a ride today. I’ve got my friend Gideon here ProVisor’s favorite.

How you doing Gideon?

Gideon Grunfeld: I am doing awesome and delighted to be here.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. Yeah. This was a long time in the making, a long [00:02:00] time in the coming. We got together at the Provisors Group Leader Summit and we kind of were like sitting at the table and we’re like, why haven’t we met before? Why haven’t we collaborated?

And this was like our first thing that we said we had to do so. Absolutely i’ve

Gideon Grunfeld: been a fan for a long time and heard about you and get your newsletter and for those of you listening i highly recommend the newsletter if i can start off the bat with that and so delighted that we got assigned to the same table.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah that was fortuitous and bro as well and yeah if you want to sign up for the newsletter i think there you could just email me at steven Fretzin dot com and i’ll shoot that off to you but you know what’s the article that i put in above the law what are the podcast for the week you know that kind of stuff and.

Just making sure you guys are properly. Informed and educated on what what we’re teaching lawyers these days. So let’s start off with our quote of the show and it’s apropos for what we’re going to cover today. The quote is, if no one is complaining about your fees, you are almost certainly not charging enough.

And who’s the famous person that came up with that? I think his name is He sounds

Gideon Grunfeld: suspiciously like me. Ah, [00:03:00] yeah. He’s been slurring that to clients and people I know for 20 years.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah, and I love that quote and it is so on the money, but welcome to the show and please give us some explanation of why that is your quote of the show.

Gideon Grunfeld: That is my quote of the show because I have lived this in every way imaginable. So, I lived this when I was a lawyer and I was a large firm litigator and there was always a question about hourly rates and it occurred to me one time when I was a junior, kind of, baby lawyer, listening to more senior lawyers talk about this, that they were all Worried about the reaction of the client or the potential client.

And it occurred to me, I have a business background. I have a business degree. And I was like, that’s just odd. At some point you have to test the market. And so it occurred to me, just the thought popped in my head. It really was like one of those thought bubbles and it was no one’s complaining about your rate.

You’re almost certainly not charging enough.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah, I love it. And you know, obviously we’re both in the business development space too, which means we’re asking our clients, you know, what are you charging an hour? And are you closing every deal? Like, Oh yeah, I [00:04:00] close every 10 out of 10. Well, if you’re closing 10 out of 10 on estate planning or some of these other things, and yeah, maybe you might be a little bit low and then we realized, wow, they’re way low.

And and so it’s not like you have to send out an email and say, Hey, everybody, I know I’m 400 an hour, but now I’m 600 an hour, right? We don’t have to do that. You know, we also could start right with like the new people we sign up that don’t know what our rates are. Like that seems like low hanging fruit, right?

Gideon Grunfeld: A hundred percent. And that is, in fact, when people ask me the question, what’s the easiest way to start? It is to start with a subset of potential new clients and so when you get someone who’s essentially brand new to you, you don’t have an issue that they come from a trusted referral source and part of the relationship is you want to keep the referral source happy or it’s your cousin or if you have any ties like that, that’s not ideal, but you get someone really new to you.

They have minimal connections to you, they come through your website, or some of you don’t know well. Don’t fall for the fallacy, which happens in gambling. See, in gambling, you go to the casino, and if you go to the roulette table, they show you the prior results of the [00:05:00] table. The table does not know that.

The only people who know that are bad, people who have bad statistics. And the same thing is true for this. Meaning, you might know that the last time you quoted this rate you’re at 4. 25 an hour, but no one else knows, and so feel free to go quote an appropriate rate and don’t be a prisoner to your path.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah, I love it. So you guys are hearing Gideon Grunfeld, President of Rainmaking for Lawyers. By the way, that name, it’s a lot of, a lot like how to manage a law firm, like you put in the term that someone would put into Google, and I don’t know if you thought of that at the time, but, you know, but that’s like kind of my thoughts, like, wow, that’s such a better name than, Fretzin or be that lawyer.

No, one’s typing that into Google unless they want to find me. But describing what you do is I think a great name for a company nowadays.

Gideon Grunfeld: It is. I mean, although I have to say reigning for lawyers is a lot to spell in a URL and Fretzin is unique because I don’t know. You probably know this better than I do.

What else in the world is called Fretzin? So if someone at the beginning, no one knows your name, but after a while you’re the only thing on the [00:06:00] planet that you’re certainly the only thing in this space and the professional services space, consulting, advising space. So you own that name, and so, I love your, I love the name of that business.

Now, the thing is, Grenfell does not, Fretzin is way easier to pronounce and spell and remember, so, I think you went the right way with that one.

Steve Fretzin: Alright, I’m onto something. Yeah, and just so everyone knows Fretzin is a unique name. There’s about 25 of us in the country, in the world, and they’re all my family.

So this was a, a name changed at Ellis Island years ago through a grandfather and all that jazz. But I don’t know, that’s, you know, I was talking to, you know, the, how to manage the, you know, the law firm guy. That’s exactly it. Like, you know, put in the actual search. Of what someone would type into Google anyway, but give us a little bit of background because I think it’s important to set up the conversation we’re going to have for people to know kind of where you came from.

Gideon Grunfeld: Yeah, happy to do it. So I am a fourth generation lawyer. So I am currently inactive status technically, but I was a lawyer. My mom’s a lawyer. My grandfather was a lawyer on four continents. I [00:07:00] joke sometimes it’s almost a genetic defect. This is something I really grew up with around the table. My extended family formed a small bar association.

So this is the world I came in. And I was a lawyer and before that I was a consultant. I was an HR executive before I went to college out of college. I worked for a consulting firm based in LA now, but worked back east. And so worked for large law firms for 10 years. I was a litigator. I just did antitrust.

Law, I had a side practice, a pro bono practice representing charter schools. And then I decided just for, I want to do something truly entrepreneurial and started my own consulting business a little bit more than 20 years ago. And since then we really been working on business development and more recently a lot of just institutional issues, succession planning, strategic planning, mergers, acquisitions, all of those kinds of things, compensation.

And one of the things that happens all the time is we end up talking about fees. It’s one of the most. I think you find this too. If you want to help someone in our [00:08:00] world, in our space, helping them raise their fees and collect their fees is the fastest deliverable we provide. And that’s why I absolutely love of talking about it.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. You can go out and build, you know, get 10, 20, 30 percent more business, or you could just tell everyone, Hey, pay me 50 bucks more an hour or whatever it is that you’ve got to do. And it jumps it up. I think there’s a reason why lawyers are notoriously scared and bad at raising rates, and I would love for to hear your take on that.

Gideon Grunfeld: I think for two reasons. One is that they don’t have good examples. And so even the most diligent person, if they’re really modeling it, a lot of times they do, this is what I saw the person down the hall, this is what I saw early in my career, this is what I call a buddy or two. You know, I go to the trade association and I ask what they do and most lawyers don’t have a strategy.

So what happens is you replicate sort of suboptimal ways of doing it. And then I think there’s a subtle, more even stronger point. The biggest [00:09:00] obstacle is psychological. Is that, and it goes to the quote that you started with, which is that subconsciously people think that the goal of negotiating about fees is to avoid the conversation.

And so the more you minimize the objections you win, and it’s a little bit like the example you cited. It would be like the real estate agent or broker says, I can sell your property in 48 hours. And I’m sure they can, if they lower the price low enough, right. If they really sell you down the river on the price, they will sell it.

And so I think there’s this unspoken sense among lawyers that I should be avoiding this conversation. And I think partly because they don’t have a strategy, the whole thing makes them uncomfortable. And so they just avoid it. And that’s where a lot of lawyers are where they are.

Steve Fretzin: I have a quick story. My late great Larry, the lawyer father don’t have a long lineage of lawyers like you do, but I did have one and he was the best.

And He was retired from law. He was walking down the sales street in Chicago with, you know, all the lawyers hang out and a client [00:10:00] approached him, past client and said, Larry, Larry, are you practicing again? He goes, no, no, I’m retired. I’m just down here for an arbitration. I’m helping out. And she goes, oh my God, you were the best lawyer I ever had.

I’ve never seen your like since. And God, were you cheap? So I think that story just had to be told for this episode, because I think my father, I know my father was an amazing lawyer. He was the smartest guy in any room he’d walk into, but I don’t think he had the business acumen and also there’s another twist to it, which is he grew up in the project.

So I think he and money had a very odd relationship and that might be something else that other people are dealing with is their relationship to money and their value and pricing. So maybe that’s something we can get into a little bit too.

Gideon Grunfeld: A hundred percent. I think that part of what in my mission in life is, given the background I have, is that I see that lawyers devalue themselves all the time.

They do it in their conversations with potential clients serving the public at large. Sometimes, people don’t realize what a blessing it is to [00:11:00] be one of the few professions that people tell jokes about. That means that you’ve hit a certain status that you can tell a joke to millions of people and lawyers are part of the joke.

So enjoy the status, we’ve earned it. We do a terrible job as lawyers in the legal community explaining some of what we do and how miraculous it is. I’ve had conversations with people, and you don’t hear this in plumbing supply companies, that said, imagine that in your field, for example. Some significant portion of your annual membership dues went to paying for victims of other bad lawyers.

And that’s literally when you pay your, especially in California and states like that, half of your legal fee, your membership dues go to pay People harmed by other lawyers and lawyers do a terrible job of explaining that and a lot of what we do is they go My I just give you documents I give you this document in that document and this as if people wake up in the morning thinking they need a document as opposed To what the document does and the document does miraculous things And that’s one of the reasons why we’re having all these pressures on [00:12:00] price is because lawyers don’t give the client or the world enough information so that they do anything other than choose the lowest price product.

So, I think that’s a lot on us and I agree with you. Some of it is lawyers have an uneasy relationship to money. And it shows up and they think, Oh, my hourly rate is a hundred times the minimum wage. And that has to be, and they kind of get squeamish about it.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. It’s like, you know, Hey, I, you know, I just made a thousand dollars an hour.

And for someone to say that, or someone to hear that it just sounds wrong or it sounds weird and it sounds, and there, but there are athletes and actors and executives, right. That are making, you know, thousand dollars a minute, thousand dollars every 10 seconds. Right. So it’s like, It’s all, you know, based on, you know, what they’re serving, like what value they’re bringing to the table and how is it impacting the people around them, their company, building a big corporation, winning a Super Bowl or helping you win a trial.

They all have great value. It’s just a matter of, [00:13:00] you may not necessarily feel what maybe other people are perceiving. Ah,

Gideon Grunfeld: I understand. And you see that both in routine, like in, with things that lawyers perceive as routine, and they’ve somehow convinced the people that it’s routine. Take estate planning.

Think about the risk associated. You draft a document. You hold onto it for 40 years. Potentially, maybe longer. You have the liability for that much. You’re having to keep up with tax changes and legal changes. And you imagine what the client would pay if they had to do this themselves. Think of the incredibly complicated issues, financial, emotional status.

end of life, religion, faith, and lawyers just say, Oh, here’s a document. We’ll charge you 3, 500 for it without explaining just how unbelievable this document is. It’s literally the products of decades of experience and trial and error and mistakes that other people have made. And they just make it seem like, oh, we just print the document and we [00:14:00] replace your name with the last client’s name, and they make it seem like a commodity because they don’t always themselves appreciate not only like how powerful the document is and how amazing it is, they don’t at all think about it.

The liability that comes if they screw up and that people don’t charge for that. And that’s just ridiculous.

Steve Fretzin: Well, another angle to this too, Gideon, is maybe the, the way that a lawyer is approaching the sales process, because if it’s, I’m providing an estate plan, you’re providing me money and that’s an exchange, a product, right, or product or service for money.

And if the sales process has done well, where the questions are being asked and what would happen if this happened or what would happen if that happened. And, you know, who would fight over this? If, if you didn’t have this in place, you know, it’d be a, a free for all between my mother in law and my sister, you know, sumo wrestling for my, you know, to get my son and our money or whatever, like there’s all these.

Emotional parts to, you know, all different kinds of law. And I don’t think [00:15:00] people that go in with a pitch, you know, Realize how much they’re giving up from a standpoint of the emotional connection, the empathy, and the value that can be perceived when a sales process is done properly. So maybe talk through that a moment as well.

Gideon Grunfeld: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think lawyers underestimate and undervalue that tremendously, and I think they do it in a couple of ways. So in terms of the sales process, I agree with you a hundred percent, which is if you look at the sales process as a transaction, like. I’m selling you a widget and you’re going to say, and then we’re never going to see each other again, which is a ridiculous paradigm for legal services.

Legal services are the opposite, meaning I’m probably going to help you with something either one of the most difficult parts of your life or at a minimum something that’s emotionally impactful and the cost of getting it wrong in financial terms and emotional terms and nuisance and annoyance is off the charts high.

We use estate planning. If you said to them, what is the cost of at the end of your life? Not having your wishes based on your faith or [00:16:00] your values be carried out. Incalculable. What’s the cost if your crazy aunt Sally, everybody has some crazy aunt or uncle, you’re like, they get control of your finances or your business or the family heirlooms.

What’s the cost of that? Incalculable. And so rather than pitching it as I am your guide. I am, we’re going to embark on a journey together and my job is to keep you out of trouble. Ultimately you make the decisions, but we’re on a journey together and I had decades of experience that’s based on hundreds of years of complicated stuff.

That I’m going to simplify for you. If you approach it that way, first of all, then you’re not chasing people because when you’re looking at yourself as the guide, then the people who want to be there on that path, will you, you’ll attract them and you’ll also deter the people you should be deterring. And otherwise it’s just like every sale I make is something I just need to sell more and more stuff to people.

And that tends to devalue you. And then you get clients that in the back of your head, you’re going, [00:17:00] Ooh, I knew from the beginning that wasn’t the right person or that wasn’t the right organization.

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So there’s a lot of intricacies about value and fees, but I think I would love to hear you talk a little bit about the common mistakes that lawyers make when. They attempt or actually do increase their rates.

Gideon Grunfeld: So, yeah, so I would say that there are a couple, so there’s both when they increase their rate, they do it either indiscriminately or without a strategy.

So they don’t choose the right people. And we talked a little bit about much easier to raise your rates with new clients. The psychology of increasing rates on existing clients is there, and I’ve helped countless people do it, but it’s much more complicated because they have a baseline of what you charge.

And if you say to them, remember 400, now it’s going to be seven 50 an hour. It’s you’re going to have to have a good explanation as to why in a very good emotional hook, but for a new client, start with them. And I would say that the biggest mistake that people make is that they are prisoners of the past.

And they are like, they’re almost chained to whatever that number [00:19:00] was. The new number has to be 5 percent or 8 percent or 10 percent of that number rather than look at what’s the value of the client, what am I providing. Or another thing that’s really powerful, if someone said to, I say to clients all the time, imagine you wanted to charge this, or you wanted to make your initial retainer, why?

How would you have to tweak your services for you to feel comfortable that’s worth it? Because people look at the rate as like some immutable thing and it’s not. You want to charge that much, then provide the value that’s going to make that people happy to pay your rate. And usually you don’t have to change that much.

So the first thing is this mindset of, then there’s also the execution of how you decide what the rate is and how you communicate it. So we can talk about those in different segments if you want, but those are the three major mistakes. It’s the mindset, it’s deciding what the rate should be and it’s deciding how to communicate it.

Steve Fretzin: And is it part in part understanding or doing research on what currently the market will bear? So [00:20:00] if I’m charging 400 an hour and the people that have the same level of experience as me and similar maybe size firms or whatever are charging 600 an hour, obviously, I’m undervaluing myself compared to the market.

So is that part of the process or is that those lawyers will never do?

Gideon Grunfeld: I would say yes to both answers. So it’s a small part of the process, but here’s what I recommend that most people do. Don’t worry about what the market is and I’ll tell you why. I have almost never met in 20 years of doing this. As a consultant in the 10 years, I was a lawyer.

I’ve almost never met a lawyer who is extravagantly just, they go crazy on the right.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah.

Gideon Grunfeld: They’re almost always too conservative. They’re almost always too inhibited. They’re almost too conservative. Right. So don’t worry too much about what the, what you think the market will bear. And the reason is what most lawyers end up doing is they end up skewing that analysis to sort of depress the rate.

What I suggest that people do is use something a lot easier. So if you’re [00:21:00] charging by the hour, use something that I refer to as psychological breakpoint, which is just go to the next number in your market. that actually has some psychological significance. And I came up with this, actually, there was someone I worked with years ago who charged 2.

60 an hour. And I kind of blurted out, I said, nothing costs 2. 60. And it’s true. Nothing costs 2. 60, nothing costs 260 an hour. And the reason is anybody who will pay 2. 50, 2. 60, 2. 65, 2. 70, there’s some numbers that just don’t have any psychological significance. There’s a reason car companies charge you 49, 995 because they know 50, 000 actually is a barrier, has some psychological impact.

So I just say, look at the psychological barriers above you, don’t do market analysis at first, and just go, just be right below the next psychological barrier. So if you’re at 410 or some weird number, And you’re thinking 450 or 500 is the next psychological barrier, and you have this new potential client, just quote him, [00:22:00] 495.

You’ll thank me. Targeted with this is to exercise your muscle of feeling a little bit uncomfortable.

Steve Fretzin: Well, and here’s the backup, and I’m not saying that this should be done, but you say 490. And you do get pushback, well A, you learn something and B, you still have the ability to say, you know, I, you know, cut it, not, I don’t want anybody cutting rates, but like you can cut back and say, well, look, I mean, if it, if it matters that much to you, we can do 475.

I mean, that’s still above where you were and they feel like they’re getting a deal and you’re still, you know, 25 or 50 above where you were.

Gideon Grunfeld: A hundred percent, and that goes to the, to the, how to communicate it. So assuming that, so let me just say one thing about how to decide. So one of the things that people make a, like, I think a big mistake on is they look at their practice as a uniform practice and every, every, every client has to be charged the same way rather than looking at it as a portfolio you’re managing and you want a little diversity in your portfolio.

You might be charging almost all hourly rates, but have a flat fee. You might have only flat fee and hourly rate having an original, [00:23:00] have an occasional contingency. That’s the, that’s the thing that makes, gives you a chance to hit a home run and reduces the overall risk of your portfolio. So that’s a whole other, I do a whole seminar about it, but that’s part of the, think about it that way.

You don’t have to have uniform pricing. People board planes all the time, and if you ask the person next to you how much they paid for their seat, it could be a wildly different number than you, you don’t get off the plane. And some lawyers have this, they’re prisoners, they’re like, I have to do the same thing for every client because someone will know.

I don’t know who that someone is, but that’s a thought.

Steve Fretzin: Let’s say he’s out there, she’s out there.

Gideon Grunfeld: She’s out there somewhere. And so, the other thing is that people just don’t understand. So if you’re deciding how to charge between a flat fee and an hourly rate, The quintessential question to ask yourself is, how is value?

Is value a proxy of the time? Is time a value of the proxy of what I provide? So let me give you an example. If you are in pre litigation, and someone comes to you and says, Hey, and you understand, you say, I’m going to write a letter to opposing counsel. I’m going to write a letter to the CEO of the company you’re [00:24:00] dealing with, and I’m going to put it on my letterhead, and I’m going to make this go away from you.

The value you’re providing has very little to do with the time you’re putting it. In fact, if you can make it go away really fast, the client values it even more. So do not charge by the hour. I’ve seen people for miracles. They literally go on the phone for 15 minutes. They write one letter, they make a 250, 000 case go away where that check that the other side wasn’t sending you suddenly appears or you get 80 percent of it.

And then they’ll, they’ll build their client for 0. 75 hours. And I go bonkers. I’m like, what? The value you provide had nothing to do with your time, so then charge flat fee, charge a percentage, that’s a key question. Now there are things where your time is a good proxy, in discovery, in litigation, in negotiation, there’s certain things where time is, but don’t reflexively think you only can charge in one way, with the exception of things like divorce, where you’re limited by the rules, or certain, you know, you can’t charge a contingency if you’re for divorce.

Lawyers dramatically underutilize their [00:25:00] options and they don’t, they’re totally unaware of, Hey, should I be charging by the hour or not?

Steve Fretzin: Well, not only that, but this also plays into a little bit of delegation down and AI and things that are going to make things more efficient. Charging a flat fee is sort of going to make a lot more sense than hourly, maybe in the future, more than today.

Gideon Grunfeld: A hundred percent. I think we’re already seeing, I don’t know, just a couple of weeks ago. So this would have been in. October, November 2024, not to date to not to make this a non evergreen topic, although it’s an evergreen topic. They’re now public comments about AI being used to create very good drafts of patent infringement complaints and lawsuits among the most complex.

And they were sending them to patent lawyers and saying, this is pretty good. This is not as good as what I would write. This isn’t what I find a product would be. We’re absolutely going to a world where you’ll be able to create a rough draft in minutes, hours, and it will make no sense to do that on an hourly basis.

The value [00:26:00] you provide is all in your ability to take something that’s rough and polish it and use your decades of experience or even three years of experience. Cause you know, what is important. You also know what’s not in the document that should be in the document. That’s the hardest thing for AI to know.

And time is not going to be the proxy for your value, but your value is still going to be unbelievably high because of your knowledge base and your expertise.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. So we’ve talked about hourly, we’ve talked about flat fee. A number of lawyers are also moving to a subscription model. Do you work with the folks on that?

Gideon Grunfeld: I do. And so I think subscription models work really well when you have high volume repetitive, the subscription works. So for instance, I worked in antitrust law and antitrust law would not work on a subscription model because unless you’re Microsoft, no one has that much repeat antitrust work, but let me give you a lots of examples.

If you are a management side employment lawyer and you are doing, you know, employee handbook, you’re giving advice and counsel and employment [00:27:00] law throughout the country is getting incredibly complex and minimum wage laws and all of this stuff. Then that’s a model that you can space out the payment because you’ll know that some months they won’t need you at all and some months they’ll need you a lot.

And a subscription model is a great way to also get the client to open up and use you a lot at the beginning, where if you charge them 500 bucks an hour, they might be reluctant to really engage with you initially. The subscription model there gets them engaged, you get to solve their problems, you get to prevent some problems, they get comfortable with you.

And then when the time comes, some big thing might happen and you go, okay, for this, we might need to do it outside, especially litigation outside this description. But people who are doing high volume, repetitive issues, family law, there’s a custody dispute, and the issue is every holiday season, how are we going to divide who has the kids for the Thanksgiving, who’s going to get them for Hanukkah, who’s going to get them for Christmas.

Subscription models for that kind of stuff is, I think, awesome and way underutilized.

Steve Fretzin: [00:28:00] Yeah. Awesome. So, we’re wrapping up. What final thought or tip for lawyers who are, you know, looking to increase fees? One more tip.

Gideon Grunfeld: Be confident about how you communicate it. At the end of the day, you can blow the whole thing.

You can be thoughtful about what to charge and how to calculate it. And then what happens if someone asks you immediately what you charge and you don’t have any context in the case, do not blurt out the fee. First of all, someone who wants to know what you charge right away is almost surely not a good client.

It’s a red flag. If the first thing they want to know is like, what do you charge? Given the kind of problems lawyers solve, go find out contacts, find out what’s at stake for them, get them to explain to you what’s at stake, you can work it, work that conversation together, and then if you say, oh, so if you lose this lawsuit, you’re going to lose your top client, you’re going to lose a competitor, you’re going to lose 500, 000, you get.

Then, when you have context, then go to fee, because then the fee in comparison to what’s at stake is sensible. If you just go we have a 15, 000 [00:29:00] retainer and we charge 6. 95 an hour and you haven’t heard context, the client is gonna, like, the client almost has no choice but to go to the cheapest person they heard.

Steve Fretzin: Do you want to hear a great response to that I came up with a while ago? When someone asks their fees, you say, you say, that’s a fan. First of all, we say it’s a fantastic question because it is. Okay. That’s all right. That’s a fantastic question. Unfortunately, Gideon’s like asking me how much does a bag of groceries cost?

And is it cup foods or whole foods? So what I’d like to do is spend a little more time really, you know, understanding everything that’s going on in the missing pieces. And yeah, I promise you near the end of our meeting today, we’ll talk about rates. Is that okay? Now, if they say, sure, you’re back on track.

If they say, no, I still want to know your rates. To your point earlier, this is absolutely a tire kicker. This is someone who’s not, who’s just price shopping.

Gideon Grunfeld: Yeah, that’s a great advice. And then the other thing I’ve said to people, I ask people, so, okay, my understanding is you want this, this, this, and that you have a complicated divorce.

Are you looking to do this with the, like the absolute cheapest possible cost?

Steve Fretzin: Yeah.

Gideon Grunfeld: And if they say [00:30:00] yes, like, I mean, you wouldn’t go to a heart surgeon and go, well, honey, the most important thing, we found a great heart surgeon. I love one. Cheapest surgeon in town.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. In pain. Low end tools.

Gideon Grunfeld: Low end tools.

So don’t be the low end tool. So don’t go with that. Have confidence in the value you provide as a lawyer. You deserve it.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. Just awesome. Well, listen, let’s wrap up as we love to do on this show with our Game Changing Podcast. This has been, this has come up before, but let’s, I want to hear your take on it.

Cause I’m not really listening to it, but maybe I should. Huberman lab.

Gideon Grunfeld: Yeah. Huberman lab is, I think he’s amazing on a couple of levels and inspiration for people like you and me and our listeners. One is he is really, he’s grown an audience of five, 6 million people talking about hardcore science about really difficult issues where he goes into depth about nutrition and science and working out and relationships.

And he interviews all these people from Stanford and all these universities around the world. And so he’s really shown. That you can get people to talk about super complicated, high content, [00:31:00] sophisticated stuff and people are going to listen for two, three hours. And for me, he’s an inspiration because that’s always the issue.

Do we dumb it down? Do we not? And he, and I personally have, there was a 20 hour, I’m not exaggerating, 20 hour six part interview he did with Andy Galpin, who’s a professor. Cal State Fullerton, who’s one of the leading experts about exercise in the world. And they break down weightlifting, every kind of workout.

I learned more from that that’s impacted my life. I found it just unbelievably valuable. And so that’s why I’m kind of a nerd fan of the human lab podcast, as many people are.

Steve Fretzin: Well, I’m going to have to put that on my watch list and then everybody should too. If you’re in that kind of information, which we all should be, it’s like you’re the product, you know, put the oxygen mask on yourself first kind of thing.

Really fantastic. So let’s take a moment to thank our wonderful sponsors, of course, LawHer podcast. You’re going to want to check that out and get lots of great insights on how women are being successful in the law. And of course, Rankings IO helping their clients with [00:32:00] lead generation and following through to actually lock up that business.

Gideon, if people want to get in touch with you, they want to, cause you do a lot more than just the fee stuff. You’re like a full service consultant and coach for law firms and attorneys. So maybe give just a little bit about more about what you do and then how people get in touch with you.

Gideon Grunfeld: Yeah, absolutely.

So our company, Rayming, we’re lawyers, full service consulting. We do strategic planning, succession planning, mergers, acquisition, fee setting, compensation for firms all around the country. We’re based in California, but we really work in California. Most major cities and lots and lots of states we work with anybody who wants to, who’s already in that kind of firm or is aspiring to grow a firm that big.

We work with people, two, three lawyers want to become eight or 20 just, we love people who are ambitious and entrepreneurial. That is sort of our sweet spot. In terms of getting a hold of me, I’m blessed with an unusual and difficult to spell name. So there are a couple easy ways to find me. One, on LinkedIn, Gideon Grenfell.

There’s only one. I’d say I’m the only person on the planet with that name. G I D E O N and G [00:33:00] R U N F E L D. That’s the easiest way. You can also find me just by email gideon at rainmakingforlawyers. com. You can find our website, www. rainmakingforlawyers. com. Three easy ways to find me. Yeah. And I would love, I’d love, I know your audience is awesome and I would love to help any of them in any way I can.

Steve Fretzin: Awesome. And all that’ll be in the show notes as well. And you know, thank you so much, Gideon. I’m not only so thrilled that we met in person in LA but also that we were able to do this podcast and I think there’s probably a lot more. Synergies and things that we can do moving forward. I’m very, very pumped and excited about that.

Gideon Grunfeld: I am too. Hopefully this is just the beginning and I certainly welcome the opportunity to share some value and help your fabulous audience.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. Well, I know you have today. I mean, this is a topic that has not been, you know, beat to death and I try not to beat to death any topics, but this one in particular, I think really will resonate with people that.

Have been struggling with this question and just getting some insights that it doesn’t have to be rocket science to make decisions and to get it across the finish line. So [00:34:00] thank you again. And by the way, everybody, thank you for being a great listener. If you know other lawyers that would get value from this podcast, don’t be shy.

Let them know that we’re here and we’re available and it’s free. So come on. And thanks again for listening today and and we’ll continue to help you to be that lawyer, confident, organized, and a skilled rainmaker. Take care, everybody. Be safe. Be well. Talk again soon.

Narrator: Thanks for listening to Be That Lawyer, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Visit Steve’s website Fretzin. com for additional information and to stay up to date on the latest legal business development and marketing trends. For more information and important links about today’s episode, visit us Check out today’s show notes.