This is certainly not a new debate but, with financial pressures mounting, it has recently been grabbing column inches all over the place, from the Washington Post to the Economist.
In the early days many law firms worked on a fixed fee basis. The change to time recording became commonplace in the 1970s so that clients could see how their money was being spent. In recent years this has led to criticisms that lawyers are now incentivised to spend excessive time on files and to work inefficiently. So who advocates time recording these days?
New efforts to jettison hourly billing are being driven by in-house corporate lawyers, who say they have grown frustrated seeing fees to outside firms soar even as they slash their own costs. However, in such a conservative profession, such structural changes are generally slow to be embraced…
As any practising lawyer will vouch for, time recording is one of the most tedious tasks that lawyers have undertake. Private-practice lawyers account for their time in increments of 15 minutes, or even five or six minutes at some firms.
Most British and American firms set targets for all their lawyers, from 1,300 billable hours a year to 1,800 hours and beyond and Lawyers who exceed their targets often get a bonus. Does this value quantity of hours billed over quality?
Most clients would probably sit in the yes camp here, so if the billable hour does perish, it will be at their behest, rather than the private-practice lawyers themselves. Even if they don’t like it, getting rid would require a suitable replacement.
And those finding a replacement would need to strike a compromise between clarity for the client and profits for the law firm. Good luck to them.
October 22, 2008
nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
October 22, 2008
Yes please, get rid – time recording is boring, stressful and abused by virtually everyone at some point. I especially don’t like tossers who dump loads of time on my files if I just happen to wave it in front of them for one or two minor points. Also iIf you spend too much time on files there is only so much management of client’s expectations you can do so it just gets written off.
October 22, 2008
We had a girl with whom my colleague and I used to work, looking after a number of clients. She routinely put the final time sheet in front of our rather dozy partner having written off all our time and apportioning it to herself. This kind of practice was fairly endemic where I worked and particularly bad if you happened to be carrying out a supporting role on a transaction led in a different department. This is poor management for one thing but it also reflects on time recording as a practice. Masters in the art of time dumping manage to do all of their work in the first few days a file opens! If a transaction had a fixed fee with different elements they could be apportioned at the beginning and the work done as necessary.
December 10, 2010
Although the billable hour does not seem to be dead as yet, its days are definitely numbered. Clients are increasingly demanding reduced legal costs, forcing the law firms to innovate. One solution to the high legal fees problem is legal outsourcing.
With the advent of legal process outsourcing, legal work is now being done at a fraction of the cost in countries like India, without compromising in quality. Legal outsourcing providers are helping buyers of legal services in the U.S. reduce costs dramatically by providing cost effective legal solutions.