Adding productivity or availability to your shopping cart

Q4 is here, which as usual means more rush and pressure, especially for transactions practices. To be honest, you’re actually running a bit late if you still have to arrange something for this at this time of year.

That aside: what are you actually paying for when you quickly need extra hands?

Availability
Flexible workers are normally compared to temporary staff. You hire an external professional for four or five days a week and pay for their ‘attendance hours’. This approach has been working fine for a long time and everyone knows it well.

Productivity
You don’t look so much at the number of hours per week, but you delegate pieces and entire projects to one or more professionals. They in turn make a plan to complete it on time. The agreed rates are slightly higher, but only the billable work is charged.

In the market now, we see law firms increasingly paying for productivity instead of availability. This can be an interesting choice, for instance, because you get more control over return and more options for those times of the year when help is scarce in the market. This is an approach that also makes it easier to scale up and down quickly.

It may be worth to keep this in mind before going to checkout with your shopping cart.