Flat-fee billing: how one litigation firm competes with Big Law

For Allison Speigel, the advantage a small firm holds over a national competitor is less about resources than reflexes. A partner at Speigel Nichols Fox LLP, a commercial litigation boutique in Mississauga, Ontario, Speigel has built a practice designed to move faster, lean on flat-fee billing and stay closer to clients than the big-firm world she left behind. That positioning is the subject of a panel she will join at the Canadian Legal Summit in Toronto in October 2026, titled "The Size Advantage: How Agile Firms Are Winning in a Client-Driven Market."

Aligning incentives with a value fund

Speigel Nichols Fox was among the first firms in Canada to offer value-based flat fees across all its litigation matters, a shift Speigel dates to the mid-2010s. The firm sets aside a portion of each bill – on a $10,000 account, she explains, roughly $2,000 – into a notional "value fund." At the end of a matter, the firm can recover anywhere from nothing to double that pool, depending on the result and the client's agreement.

The logic, she says, is accountability. "You want to know that your lawyer always has some skin in the game so that they're making the decisions not just because they say it's in your best interest, but because it's also in their financial best interest," she says. Disputes are rare, and the client's view governs. Her line if one balks: "If you don't agree with the value component that I've set, that's fine, we go with yours, but I'll never work with you again," she says.

Why flat fees aren't a guarantee

The model has limits, and Speigel is candid about them. Litigation, unlike a fixed construction bid, hinges on an opponent's choices. "So much of what happens is a reaction to what somebody else is doing, and you really don't have control over the other side," she says. That is why the firm prices matters phase by phase rather than quoting a single fee for the whole case.

Her clients’ appetite has also surprised her. Despite years of industry talk about moving away from the billable hour – a trend visible across the shifting Canadian legal fee landscape – Speigel found large corporations often stick with hourly billing out of habit, while individuals are more willing to try flat fees. What clients of all kinds embrace, she says, is the value fund. "They love the idea that ... you have money riding on the result. And I think it really helps to create a level of trust that is missing in some of the lawyer-client relationships," she says. The shift is broader than her own practice: in the US, 59 percent of firms billed flat fees either exclusively or alongside an hourly rate in 2024, according to Clio’s 2025 Legal Trends Report.

Small size, fast decisions

Agility, she says, is structural. "As a smaller firm, we don't have lots of layers of decision making," she says. The firm can tailor a fee arrangement to a single client, decline a file on principle, or change course without clearing it through committees. "You can make decisions, and you can make decisions quickly," she says – an advantage she argues matters more in a market shifting almost daily.

She has seen the opposite extreme up close. Since 2024, Speigel has co-chaired Ontario’s Civil Rules Review with Justice Cary Boswell of the Superior Court of Justice, on a sweeping overhaul of the province’s Rules of Civil Procedure. The group’s final report, made public in December 2025, moderated several of its most contested proposals after consultation feedback. “From my recent experience with the civil rules, it’s very hard to get lots of people to agree on any type of big decision,” she says. “And the same holds true at a firm.”

Technology without shortcuts

On technology, Speigel is enthusiastic but unromantic. Spending on tools is easy; adoption is not. "Investing in technology is important. Then you have to get uptake, and the uptake has to ... translate to efficiency," she says, noting many lawyers never use the tools their firms buy.

Her firm went fully paperless years before the pandemic and is now testing AI tools. She uses Westlaw's research AI and a paid version of ChatGPT to tighten her writing, not to draft. The harder lesson has been that "learning how to use AI is its own skill," she says – one that can be built only through practice. Even strong results leave her wanting more: She finds that "even when the summary is totally correct" and free of hallucinations, "I still ended up wanting to go to the documents," she says, because in litigation, a few words can change a case. The trade-offs echo accounts of how AI is reshaping day-to-day litigation work across the profession. The same Clio research found that 79 percent of US legal professionals now use AI in their work, and Canadian Lawyer’s coverage of the report found that many clients are already putting their own legal questions to AI.

Where firms still lose clients

The one place Speigel believes firms of any size leave value on the table is communication. She regularly inherits files where clients cannot say what stage they are at or what the strategy is. Telling clients where a matter stands, and why, builds trust that fee models alone cannot. "If you don't understand what somebody wants out of something or where they're trying to go ... then you have no ability to be agile and address those needs," she says.

This article is based on an episode of CL Talk, which can also be found here:

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