Alternative Fee Arrangements

Wyatt welcomes the opportunity to work with clients to develop fee arrangements as alternatives to traditional hourly billing.  We have worked together with clients on a wide variety of alternative pricing arrangements.

We have offered volume discounts to clients where significant fees are involved; we have negotiated flat fee and fixed fee arrangements with clients on matters where there will be a large number of very similar claims; we have worked on a retainer basis for both litigation and corporate matters; we have capped fees on a variety of corporate matters as well as stages of litigation (with an opt-out provision for extreme circumstances); and we have negotiated and received performance-based bonuses in both litigation and corporate settings.  We have also combined some of these types of arrangements, such as caps with performance-based bonuses.

Partnership Stories

Pioneering Alternative Fee Arrangements

Wyatt developed an alternative fee approach for a business unit of a Fortune 50 company that is now used across all business divisions.  The key elements include mutual case budgeting based on evaluations of matters into “simple,” “moderately complex,” and “complex” categories, coupled with risk/reward opportunities.

Matters  that concluded over budget resulted in deep discounts from the Firm for the over budget amount.

Sharing the Risk with Clients

Wyatt discovered that our hospital clients weren’t being adequately reimbursed, but they were skeptical of funding a lawsuit.  We entered into a variety of alternative fee arrangements that shared the risk while leveraging our legal resources to maximize their effect. We recovered nearly $200 million for hospital clients and worked on a contingency fee basis as well as our standard hourly rates.