Why we quote a flat fee before we start

A vendor MSA arrives on a Thursday afternoon. Thirty-four pages, on the counterparty’s paper, and the deal owner wants it back before Friday. Everyone knows what needs to happen to it. Nobody knows what it will cost, and that one unknown is usually enough to leave it sitting another day.

That pause is the real product of hourly billing. Not the rate. The pause.

What hourly billing does to a buyer

The price arrives after the commitment. You approve an engagement, the work runs, and the number lands weeks later. By then the contract is signed and the leverage is gone. You are not choosing a price, you are receiving one.

Diligence has no natural ceiling. Under an hourly model every extra read-through is defensible. More care means more hours, and more hours mean more fee. Nothing in the structure says when thorough has become excessive, and nothing on the invoice lets you tell afterwards. Deal work is where this does the most damage: diligence expands to fill the time available, and the bill lands after you have already committed.

The most expensive line never appears on the invoice. It is the work your team does not send. An NDA, an order form, a supplier agreement: each one feels too small to justify a call to outside counsel and too binding to hand to a tool. So it queues, the close date slips, and someone eventually signs something they have not properly read. Fee anxiety becomes a review-quality problem long before it becomes a budget problem.

What fixed scope and price looks like

We quote the fee before any work starts, and for a commercial contract the quote turns on two things only: how long the document is, and whose paper it is on.

• Up to 30 pages, your paper: $750.

• Up to 30 pages on third-party paper, or 30 pages and over on your own: $1,500.

• Over 30 pages on third-party paper: $2,500.

Third-party paper is priced higher because it takes more care, not because it opens the meter. Teams running ongoing volume are priced per contract, between $250 and $2,500. Matters outside the table are quoted flat too, typically at around half standard market rates.

The important part is what the number does not do. It does not move with the negotiation. One price is agreed before work begins, however long the counterparty takes to come back and however many rounds of redlines it runs to. You pay for the outcome, not the hours.

People reasonably ask why work that AI accelerates still costs $750. Because you are not buying AI output. Our workflows do about 80% of a matter, and the fee buys the final 20%: the judgment, the negotiation and the sign off by a licensed attorney who is accountable for it.

What happens when scope genuinely changes

A flat fee is only honest if it has an answer for the matter that turns out bigger than anyone expected. If scope changes materially, we pause and tell you before continuing. The original fee stands for the original scope. Any new number is quoted and approved before work goes on. Nothing expands quietly, and the fee you approve is the fee you pay.

Under an hourly engagement, scope creep is invisible until the invoice explains it, by which point the work is done and the conversation is about payment rather than choice. Under a fixed fee it surfaces as a decision, while you can still say no, change the brief or stop.

The test worth applying

Ask what your current arrangement does to your behavior. If your team hesitates before sending a supplier agreement, batches contracts until there are enough to justify the call, or waves low-value paper through because review costs more than the risk feels worth, the pricing model is shaping your legal work more than your judgment is.

A price agreed upfront takes that calculation out of every document. The full rate table is on our pricing page.