Hi all,

Ben with Veracity Research here. I hope everyone is hanging in there.

I can't stress this enough: you need to be charging accurately for your copy costs. I know some folks are in the habit of charging $1/page regardless of whether they paid for the copies or not, but I'm telling you, it's time to re-think that practice. The big firms are all paying attention now, and they're building databases of which counties charge for copies and which offer them for free online. 

Everyone I know is perfectly fine with paying for copy costs, reimbursing abstractors for their actual expenses incurred. But they're not ok with paying for copies that were obtained for free.

I have encouraged all of Veracity's abstractor partners to raise their base fees to cover expenses like travel, equipment, and time. Using copy costs to cover those expenses is going to start attracting negative attention from a lot of your bigger clients, and I promise: you are going to start hearing about it from the national firms if you haven't already. I promise you, they are checking.

Good luck out there, everybody.

Ben