When I explain to people what PositiveWare does, they automatically assume that my primary market should be lawyers. Lawyers are (in)famous for tracking their time in 6 minute intervals, and should naturally be PositiveWare users.

But up to this moment we haven’t pursued the legal market because in my experience attorneys don’t do a lot of project planning or budgeting. This has always been contrary to how firms are run, where the goal is billable hours, not client outcomes. In other words, the meaning of legal work comes to be dominated by the billable hour.

A recent article in the Denver Post has made me rethink this assumption. The article notes that there has been a significant backlash against aggressive hourly billing by legal firms. More corporations are looking for fixed price billing from legal firms, either on a retainer basis or a project basis.

The recent addition of budgeting to PositiveWare makes it the perfect tool for managing legal work. Lawyers can track time, which is nice, but more importantly set client expectations with budgets and understand how they are doing against those budgets.

I have good friends at one of the firms mentioned in the article, Holme Roberts Owen.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Business Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.