From Thy Problem Cometh Thy Product

Our problem: lack of transparency created by the billable hour.

So it makes sense that our pricing page is popular. Our most popular page actually. 

As we doubled down on upfront prices and fixed-fee services over the last few months, our pricing page grew a bit… unruly? 

It was ugly, it was hard to find what you were looking for, there was no context, and quite frankly it offended me as a designer.

Screenshot of the previous Goodlawyer pricing page

So for my birthday this year, we redesigned it. 

But there’s so much information. So many things customers need to know. How can we show the full breadth of our services without confusing or intimidating? All this while never forgetting the ultimate goal of making legal services more accessible.

The answer: accordions and tiles! Plus a search bar, filters, and comparative pricing. Easy peasy... 

So, how did we get there? 

We listened to our customers. We did market research. We copied smart people.

1. Listen

We talk to every customer. We call everyone that uses Goodlawyer. Everyone. We send out surveys for feedback. We use heatmaps and recordings that show us where people get stuck. We use analytics to double down on popular pages and content. The point is, we do a lot to figure out what our users actually want.

We also need to understand what we’re capable of. It’s easy to promise the moon to your users, but we can’t be everything to everyone. Which means we have to choose who we care about most. And let me tell you, that is not easy when 77% of legal needs are going unmet. There’s a lot of different segments in there who need legal help.

3 years into my Goodlawyer adventure, trying to fully understand who our customers are is still my greatest challenge. I also recognize that my customer discovery journey will never end. That's the nature of the beast!

2. Research

We spent a lot of time on research trying to figure out exactly where our offering sat in the legal market, looking for gaps that we could fill, and how much our services should actually cost.

We scoured the internet for pricing. Days of searching online didn’t yield a very clear picture of the market for us. So we tried to go straight to the source.

We emailed law firms asking for quotes. We never heard back. So we called them. They told us they don’t discuss rates over the phone. We also got a lot of “it depends...”. We did NOT get any upfront prices.

The only lawyers willing to share their fixed prices with us were the ones on our platform already. Go figure.

We did find one report that had national average prices. One. As in singular. And it only had a handful of services that were even relevant for business owners… we came in around half-price or less for all 5 of these services, by the way. Another key insight from the report: less than 10% of lawyers even offer fixed-fee services. Thank you Canadian Lawyer Magazine.

That’s how hard it was for a team of four people to find prices for legal services (two lawyers, an MBA, and an engineer no less). It may sound like the beginning of a joke, but there’s no funny punchline here. Legal prices are damn near impossible to find. Especially if you’re a business owner with a million other things to do.

Despite our research being less fruitful than we had hoped when it came to comparing our prices, it reaffirmed one of the problems we’re solving: lack of pricing transparency due to the billable hour. We’ve known it from day 1, but this project just reiterated how starved the market is for a little pricing transparency. 

Affordability is important, obviously. But the importance of having a place where our customers can easily find the price of the legal services they need should not be understated. They can make more accurate budgets, they can prioritize their legal needs, they can stay in control, and ultimately, they don’t worry that they’re getting fleeced every time they need to hire a lawyer.

“Over the years, clients have become more sophisticated and this has impacted their willingness to pay, Gossin says, adding that, now more than before, expectations need to be set at the outset and clients need to know the criteria applied to their bill.” 

— Canadian Lawyer Magazine,

2020 Legal Fees Survey

3. Copy

The best form of flattery is being copied, right? Well, I try to flatter people a little bit every time I design something. 

The reality is that there are teams of people who are smarter and further along their startup journey than us, and they’ve already found ways to solve similar problems. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel and start from scratch. We just have to make sure we’ve got the right wheels for our rocket ship.

So I looked at other SaaS products, marketplaces, e-commerce stores, and more trying to find UI patterns that made sense for Goodlawyer’s pricing page. In the end we used components from a few different places and made something that works for our product.

We shared it, got feedback, made revisions, and finally built it to production this week. 

Screenshot of the new Goodlawyer pricing page

Thanks to the entire team who helped on this project, from customer and market research, to sharing inspiration, to reviewing wireframes and prototypes, and finally, building it. I feel a lot better about our pricing page now, and I’m pretty sure our customers will too. 

Let me know what you think of the new Goodlawyer pricing page. As always, we’ll be monitoring that page closely in the coming weeks and looking for ways to make it even better.