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Permanent clients as an asset
We can therefore safely say that we seriously practice in more than twenty various industries.
INTELLECT-S's permanent client base consists primarily of regular retainer payers on two types of subscription to the firm's services: one based on flat fees paid for certain scopes or amounts of work, and the other based on the usual hourly rates.
The firm replaces in-house counsel for several dozens of small and midsized businesses who outsource the management of all their ongoing and emergency legal matters. Many of the small businesses have no in-house counsel at all, others (medium-sized) have one lawyer on the staff to communicate with our professionals. We can therefore safely say that we seriously practice in more than twenty various industries.
Quick growth in the number of clients outsourcing legal support to INTELLECT-S several years ago made us develop and build a system of handling client engagements so that it permits maximum automation, eliminates miscommunication, provides top quality services within minimum time, and minimizes, if not eliminates, unpleasant surprises (such as caused by the attorney's sudden illness or other inability to make it and show up on time).
In 2010, we developed standing procedures for receipt and allocation of subscribed clients' engagements, formalized engagement entry channels and client feedback. The result was, after some debugging, a seamless system of receipt and allocation of client work to the firm's attorneys within half an hour of receipt by e-mail, telephone of fax. Standardized forms of client requests contain vital questions for clients so that often the attorney in charge does not need to contact the client for further details, which saves time. Moreover, such standard client request forms, together with ongoing client-attorney relationships with the subscribers, as well as putting in place working arrangements (such as who has the authority to give instructions on the clients' behalf), permit the entire work to be done by junior attorneys, quite qualified, but with no experience of interacting with clients, and therefore keep down expensive partner input. Finally, our CRM and PSA system permits us to monitor the status of client cases in real time and have the full picture of the client case no matter how many clients or client requests we may have at the moment.
INTELLECT-S's automated client engagement management system has a great potential for the firm in its role of an external legal department of a quickly growing number of lean, streamlined businesses; it permits to pick up increasingly more new clients without letting the quality of our services slide.
A great advantage of subscription is that it eliminates seasonality in workload and revenues and makes its financial position exceptionally stable. Another plus is that subscribers invariably retain extra services not covered by subscription, from their permanent provider.
Subscription also eliminates the usual problem of client recognition of the firm's fees and expenses, resolves the problem of billing recovery (which is 100 percent), and makes fee-cap bargaining unnecessary.