Matter budgets agreed at engagement and quietly exceeded, with the overage written off rather than discussed.
Transactional work is quoted against an assumed shape of deal and delivered against the real one. The gap between them is absorbed silently, because raising it mid-deal feels like a bad way to treat a client you want to keep.
matter budget
AFA
leverage
write-off
realization
disbursements
deal room
These are the terms the review uses with you. A page written for
law firms generally would not contain any of them.
Where it concentrates here
Specific to corporate and transactional, not to law firms generally. Each is
concentrated — a single agreement, a single code, a single account nobody reviews
— which is why a sample of the operation tends to miss it and a full pass tends to
find it. They are not findings from a named engagement.
Matter budgets agreed at engagement, exceeded by the second amendment round, and never renegotiated because the deal was live and the moment never felt right.
Alternative fee arrangements — capped, fixed or success-based — priced from a precedent deal rather than from what that deal actually consumed.
Deal work written off at the end as a relationship investment, with no record of which clients receive that investment or how much it totals annually.
Associate leverage assumed in the fee and not achieved in the delivery, so partner time carries work that was priced as associate time.
Disbursements — filing fees, search fees, local counsel — incurred and not recharged, small individually and continuous.
Where this data actually lives
Elite 3E or Aderant for matter economics; iManage for the deal file
A deal room (Datasite, Intralinks) billed to the matter but rarely reconciled
Matter budgets in the practice management system that nobody looks at after week two
Named because it changes what the intake asks
for. An extract from one of these has known gaps, and the review is built around them
rather than surprised by them.
The proposal is written for law firms as a
whole — the sequence, what we would need from you, and what it costs for your
number of operating units. What is on this page is what we would additionally expect to
find in corporate and transactional.