About Us
For over 13 years, ZwillGen lawyers have investigated, litigated and counseled on a wide-range of Internet issues including cybercrime, information security, privacy, surveillance, subpoena compliance, online marketing, behavioral advertising, internet gambling, satellite and videogame piracy, intellectual property theft, and more. Having worked as federal prosecutors and run practice groups at the nation’s largest law firms, the founders of ZwillGen can bring to bear years of experience helping the nation’s most reputable Internet companies address their highest profile issues while offering competitive pricing that allows the firm to efficiently handle day-to-day legal concerns.
Our Billing Philosophy: The ZwillGen Difference
We at ZwillGen are firm believers that the existing hourly law firm model is outdated and misaligns the interests of lawyers and their clients. Law firms should be rewarded for helping clients efficiently solve problems and discouraged from spending more time than necessary to achieve the same result. But the traditional hourly billing system reverses those incentives. This a problem that law firms and clients continue to struggle to solve. While we cannot offer a perfect solution, we can offer steps in the right direction.
Here’s how we do it. At ZwillGen, alternative pricing models are the norm, not the exception. On every matter, our goal is to find the right pricing structure to align our incentives with your success. As a result, we will try to make one or more of the following models work in each of our engagements:
- Monthly retainers. We handle all of the legal work in a given area or subject matter for a monthly retainer, which we can adjust upward or downward as the work ebbs and flows.
- Flat/project fees. Like other service vendors, we aim to provide a quote that we are prepared to live by. Under this model, we take the risk that we have underestimated the time that needs to be spent. If it takes longer, you still don’t pay any more. If we are very efficient, we get the benefit of our efficiency.
- Success fees. Even in the simplest matters, like creating Terms and Conditions for the website, you know how to measure success, and we want to deliver that result. Accordingly, you pay us a reasonable rate or fee for the work and agree on an additional fee to be paid if we are successful, however you decide to define it.
- One-Rate hourly pricing. We know that not everyone is ready to entirely abandon the billable rate model and there will still be matters where hourly rates are necessary. But the idea that you will pay more for lawyers based on how many years they are out of school regardless of how much experience they have addressing your particular issues is simply archaic. So is the idea that young lawyers actually save you money – they don’t, they just require more senior lawyers to spend more billable time on the matter supervision. At ZwillGen, we don’t have Senior Partners and junior associates, we just have lawyers all of whom work collectively to solve your problems. As a result, we prefer to make all of our lawyers available for one low rate, which represents approximately a 20% discount from the rates you would have paid for our services before we started ZwillGen.
- The old-boring-way. Some of you have corporate policies that require that you make your law firms do it the old-fashioned way, with individual rates per lawyer, and a mandatory discount from the firm’s standard rates. We think this is silly, but we’ll play along if we have to. If you ask, we can supply an individual “rack rate,” for each attorney, which is based on a 15% discount from our 2010 big firm rates. From there, we can likely meet your demand for your mandatory law firm discount. But don’t say we didn’t warn you that you’d be better off pursuing options 1-4.