Breaking Up with the Billable Hour
What if we could eliminate the billable hour?
Gwen Griggs and her firm are on a mission to make this happen.
When she was 11 years old, Gwen wrote a paper on Brown vs. the Board of Education. She read about a man who changed our world. She wanted to do the same thing, so she became a lawyer.
She had no lawyers in her family, no one to burst her bubble or tell her what practicing law was “actually like.”
After doing well in law school, she ended up in Big Law as general counsel of a company.
She showed up on her first day, and they started talking to her about needing to bill every six minutes of her day.
It made zero sense to her.
She thought, “Wait a second, if I figure something out quickly, I have to go find other things to do today to become valuable. And someone else who takes a long time to figure it out is going to win because they have more hours.”
Years later, she took a position at a company in an operations role where she was not lawyering. This ended up being a powerful experience for her.
She started asking how the practice of law fit into the business model. Every other business found a way to price. They didn’t have to go to their clients each month with a different payment amount.
She realized that pricing isn’t a mystery in any other business, just in the law.
In 2015, Gwen and her partner sat down and committed to figuring out how to do things differently. They felt confident that the same principles driving successful, scalable, high-growth companies could be used to deliver better results in the legal arena, not just for their firm, but for their clients.
The model they came up with is the model their firm still follows today.
So how does it work?
Gwen’s firm, ADVOS Legal, offers membership levels. Clients might be at $2,000 a month, $5,000 a month, etc.
To start off, ADVOS will often bring clients in with the lowest membership, since the system is different from what they’re used to. Then they take a deep dive (just like a general counsel would) and work to really understand the client’s business. After that, they’ll make a recommendation on a roughly quarterly basis to say what their client should focus on.
To hear the full rundown from Gwen, listen to my latest podcast: Breaking Up with the Billable Hour
It’s taken a lot of work and creativity to change the system, but the results Gwen and her firm have experienced have made it more than worth it. She’s seen a significant difference in her practice - especially when it comes to her client relationships.
In Gwen’s words, “You end up with a practice where the client isn't afraid to talk to you. You have much, much deeper relationships with them because they're telling you the bigger picture of things that are happening, and then we're able to give much better advice too.”
The other difference has been in their net promoter score. Instead of measuring their productivity in hours, ADVOS sends their clients a survey where they rate how likely they are to refer their firm to someone else. They use this score to measure how well they’ve served their clients.
The industry average is a 38, but ADVOS has a net promoter score of 90.
Because of the success she’s seen in her own firm, Gwen now teaches this system to other firms and lawyers. She and her team have created a coaching program where they teach people the P3 Method: Pricing, Pitching, and Profitability. They’ve also curated a community of lawyers who want to practice law really well using this approach.
On the podcast, she gave a quick rundown of what they teach:
Pricing
First, they do a deep dive into how to price. They teach you to look at historical data for your starting point. In the course, they have excel spreadsheets, worksheets, and other exercises to help you establish pricing.
Pitching
Second, they teach you how to pitch because clients are not familiar with this new system. This allows people to eliminate the mystery around pricing for their clients because they know what they’re going to pay up front.
Profitability
The third module is profitability. Once people get pricing down and clients are paying, now you can be thinking about how to improve your systems and train your team. How can you measure productivity? Not just in a way that matters to you, but in a way that matters to your clients. Because at the end of the day, you’re delivering something to your clients, and that’s what you want to measure.
To connect with Gwen or hear more about ADVOS’s community or coaching program, here’s where you can find them:
LinkedIn: Gwen Griggs
Website: AdvosPro.com
I loved getting to sit down with Gwen because she didn’t settle for the way things “have always been done” but chose to create a new way to practice law. Now she has a practice that is more fulfilling for her and serves her clients well.
Here’s to more people not billing by the hour in 2025, but creating better lives for themselves and their clients.
Erin
