How to Handle the “I Already Talked to Another Firm” Objection

A prospect sits across from you, nodding along, engaged—and then says it. “I already talked to another firm. They quoted me less.”

Watch what happens next. Most attorneys flinch. They start explaining their fee. They hint there might be room to move. Within ten seconds they’ve turned a consultation into a negotiation—and they’re negotiating against themselves.

Price pushback is almost never about price

When a prospect brings up another firm’s number, they are rarely asking you to match it. They’re telling you something more useful: they can’t tell the difference between you and the other firm yet.

That’s a positioning gap, not a pricing gap. And the worst thing you can do is answer a positioning problem with a discount.

I made this mistake for years in my own practice. Someone would mention a cheaper quote and I’d hear a threat. So I’d defend. Here’s what I learned the hard way—defending your fee out loud is the fastest way to convince a prospect it was negotiable all along.

Think about what the prospect is really doing when they drop that number. They’re handing you a test. Not “are you cheaper?” The test is “can you show me why the difference exists?” Answer it with a discount and you’ve told them it doesn’t.

What RESOLVE does in this exact moment

RESOLVE Objection Handling—Receive, Empathize, Seek, Offer, Link, Verify, Execute—was built for this. Not to steamroll the objection like an obstacle. To slow the conversation down enough to find out what the prospect is actually weighing.

Receive it without flinching. “It’s smart to talk to more than one firm. I’d tell my own sister to do the same.” You’ve just drained the tension out of the room.

Then Empathize and Seek before you say one word about money. “When you spoke with them, did you feel like they understood what’s actually at stake for you here?”

Now you’re not comparing prices. You’re comparing understanding. And understanding is a contest you can win.

Give a prospect that opening and most will take it. They’ll tell you the other firm rushed them. Felt like a factory. Never asked about the part of the case that keeps them up at night. You didn’t have to say a thing about your rates to get there.

Link the fee to what they’re afraid of

Once you understand what they’re weighing, you Link your fee to the outcome that matters to them—not to your hours, your overhead, or your years in practice.

“The number matters, I get it. Here’s what I’d weigh it against. The other firm quoted you to file paperwork. What you described to me—the custody piece, the timeline—that isn’t a paperwork case. Underpricing that kind of case usually means underworking it.”

Offer a perspective the prospect hasn’t considered, then let them sit with it. Most attorneys fill that silence immediately. Don’t. The pause is where the reframe does its work.

Then Verify, and stop talking. “Does that distinction make sense to you?” You’re not closing. You’re checking whether the prospect now sees the difference you spent the whole consultation building.

The full sequence beats the clever line

Attorneys want a great comeback line for objections. A perfect sentence that turns a no into a yes. There isn’t one. Price-comparison pushback doesn’t fall to a line—it falls to a sequence.

Run it start to finish. You Receive without defending. You Empathize so the prospect stops bracing. You Seek until you understand what they’re actually comparing. You Offer a perspective that reframes the choice. You Link your fee to their real stakes. You Verify that the reframe landed. Only then do you Execute—ask for the decision and put the retainer in front of them.

Skip a step and the whole thing wobbles. Jump straight from the objection to “here’s why I’m worth it” and you’re defending your fee again, right back where you started. Each step earns the right to the next one.

And Execute matters as much as the rest. Handle the objection beautifully, then trail off with “so, think it over,” and you’ve handed the prospect back to the cheaper firm. When the reframe lands, ask—clearly. “I’d like to get started on this. Here’s what that looks like.”

Win the objections worth winning

Here’s the part attorneys resist. Sometimes the answer is still no. Sometimes price really is the whole story, and that prospect was never going to be yours. RESOLVE doesn’t win every objection. It wins the ones worth winning—and it keeps you from discounting your way into the ones that weren’t.

So reframe what price-comparison pushback is really telling you. It’s not “you’re too expensive.” It’s “I haven’t seen the difference yet.”

Every time you drop your fee to answer that, you prove the prospect right—that there was nothing to see. Every time you slow down, ask a sharper question, and tie your work to what they walked in afraid of, you shrink the number in their mind without moving it on paper.

The firm that quoted less didn’t beat you on price. They beat you on the consultation. Fix that, and their number stops mattering.