Does Value Based Pricing increase prices or lower legal spend?

Value Based Pricing (VBP) is being sold to law firms as a silver bullet to increase prices, whereas it is being sold to clients as a silver bullet to reduce spend

Contrast the following real, but non-attributed, quotes:

"Adopt and implement value-based pricing models for your in-house legal counsel. Reduce costs based on outcomes and not hours"

With

"Increased profitability. Firms can capture genuine value for the results they deliver"

Both can be correct, but this is... a difficult circle to square 🙂 

Imagine a law firm consultant advising that if the firm adopts VBP then we can put the prices up, and an inhouse consultant advising their client that VBP will reduce legal spend

Ok so long there's no relationship between law firm and client - and because of low adoption rates this is probably where the market sits currently

But a clear contradiction if the same transaction sits at the heart of the two sets of advice. The same price cannot both go up and down

Semantically, 'value' for law firms perhaps implies 'valuable', but 'value-for-money' for clients. Perfectly fine in isolation, less so when those two perspectives collide

Logically, this indicates that VBP is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to either increasing or decreasing prices 

Put differently, VBP alone cannot increase/decrease prices, and we can also increase/decrease prices in other ways

Practically, we should focus on what we're trying to achieve (e.g. prices up or prices down) and then ask if VBP best helps us achieve that

I would also sound a note of caution if both law firm and clients are excitedly entering into a conversation about VBP

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means"

Does value based pricing increase prices? Or lower legal spend?