International Price List

The vast majority of practitioners don't publish their rates schedules at all, so I doubt this exists.

Hello Patrick

ty, for your reply.

I've taken a shot at that, but i havent found nothing of specific (like a price list). i've only got a sense of this usually the hourly tariff goes from 400$ to 650$ … but i dont remember where i red that rates…

i think that should be useful to elaborate a standard price list with min and max rates of all steps of CF process… or to write criterions to calculate them…

I'll do it for half. D

… -) yeah, sure, me too!

Hi again!

i'd like to know what type of hourly tariffs do you applicate in your country?

Is there anyone interested to try making a general international price list draft?

I think that it is fair to say that in this economy, pricing is very flexible. In addition, like attorney's fees, the hourly rate can differ from market to market. I know that being located in Pittsburgh, where the cost of living is low, our clients come mostly from larger markets (New York, Chicago, Boston, DC,, etc.), because our rates are more competitive.

In reality, hourly rate is frequently less important to the client than the overall cost of the projcet. Insofar as our firm is concerned, we try to use our past experience to provide our clients with an estimate of the total cost of what the tasks we may be asked to do will be (including the potential costs of not doing what we recommend, which helps to prevent sticker shock). The hourly rate simply becomes a convenient means of allocating costs (this doesn't go for testimony which is a fixed rate).

At least in my experience in the private sector, many clients have in mind what they are willing to spend for an investigation (at least as plaintiffs, since the defense rarely has a choice with respect to costs). The issue becomes one of how important it is to our firm to have that client's business since our clients are our principal source of referrals.

As for the range that you quoted, in US dollars, I am certain that you can get top notch talent for far less than that. In fact, according to the rates posted on Tony's web site, you could get his firm for half of that $400 you mentioned.

Price doesn't necessarily reflect value, in my experience. As an example, we were involved in a case where our entire bill for the services rendered, up until the trial), was 1/3 that of the cost of the opposing side's expert.

The opposing side's expert testimony and report was thrown out on a Daubert challenge and our client prevailed.

As Sean said, the rate doesn't necessarily scale relative to the level of skill. In much the same way as Sean uses his location in Pittsburgh to keep his costs low to service surrounding markets, I also use location, a modest space and tight cost controls for my lab to keep my costs low so I can charge below the market rate for my level of experience.

Which raises another issue. If you look at the standard corporate structure of the big consulting firms, they bill at different rates based on seniority and experience. Hence a partner bills at a higher rate than a manager or an associate. If you look at some job adverts in the US, you're looking at 0-2 years experience for associate, 2-5 years for senior associate, and then the manager levels and up are kind of variable.

So any price list would have to have some way to deal with scaling for experience / management.

Then of course, you have some firms who try flat fees, or bill by data volume, especially in the e-discovery arena. So if you're billing $xxx per drive for collections, then $xxx / GB for the data, how does that relate to an hourly rate?

Sean is also right that most clients can't wrap their minds around the hourly rate or a data based rate, and instead ask you to estimate what the total cost would be. As an example, I told a client that I expected his job would come in under $4k for the examination, more if it had to go to court. He was happy with that and the job came in under budget and he got a good result, and his attorney asked me to write up some materials estimating costs of various scenarios so it would be easier to get a client onboard even before contacting me. I wrote up I think 4 different commonly seen scenarios, and the cost varied by I think over 300% from lowest to highest estimate.