Kill it! Kill it!

This article from Slate about the hopefully approaching death of the law firm billable hour makes my heart soar. Yes, it is true that billing your life in six minute increments is the most soul sucking experience imaginable.

For those of you who have never done it, and who work a full time job, simply imagine if at the end of the day today you had to be able to give a written accounting of every single thing you did for your job. Imagine you needed to have written down in detail every single project you worked on, every phone call you made or received, every conversation you had, every email you drafted or read, and every document you wrote or edited. Imagine that your description of each item needed to be precise in exactly how long it took and what you did for that time. Now imagine that if you could only account for what amounted to 6.5 hours of work today even if you were there fore 8, that your salary would be cut by 20% for today. And imagine that if your accounting were wrong, if someone else remembered that conversation as being 25 minutes when you had it as 30, that someone would complain about it and you would be intructed to be more precise next time. Imagine that in addition to writing ALL of that down and being painstakingly accurate, you also had to assign task codes to every single thing you did through some arcane system designed by the ABA just to further torture every billing lawyer on the planet.

Now, imagine having to do that every single day for the rest of your life. Even on weekends, because Lord knows you might answer a phone call or send an email on the weekend and every single thing you do for a client needs to be captured. Imagine that if at the end of a week you could only account for 30 hours of work completed despite having been there for more than 40 hours, that you new you were now behind and would need to catch up next week by billing 50 hours instead of 40. Imagine that asshole clients told you that they would not pay you for travel time, so if you spent 8 hours travelling to San Francisco for a project, you could only bill for the time on the plane that you spent reviewing documents or drafting a proposal, even if that only amounted to half of the time it took you to get there. Imagine that an incredibly difficult project took you 25 hours to complete, but the client came back and said they thought it should only have taken you 15, and that they were not going to pay you for the "extra" time you spent. Imagine that so many of the mundane things we do around the office--cleaning out our inbox, filing things away, cleaning up or reviewing our calendars or to-do lists, and general team meetings and conversations about how things are going overall, could not be captured on your daily billing. Nor could any client pitches, involvement in professional organizations, attendance at seminars or conferences, or company parties and events.

It would suck, right? You'd want to rip your hair out after a couple days? Welcome to the world of the law firm lawyer.

The article is correct that many clients are seeking flat rate or alternative billing arrangements in order to keep legal costs down and remove incentives for their outside counsel to bill the shit out of their cases. My current firm has such an arrangement with one of our clients, and my last firm had that arrangement with the auto manufacturer I represented. The problem is, we still had to accurately bill our time even though the client was paying a flat fee. In the event the client was able to obtain attorney's fees in a case, they needed our records to show what they were entitled to recoup. And, because the entire firm was not on flat fee arrangements, for bonus and advancement purposes they still wanted to know how much we billed. The same is true in my current situation.

If anything, the flat fee arrangement simply gives those of us who work on those cases a reason to be lax about worrying about whether our time accounting is entirely accurate. The paralegals fudge a little in how long they spent creating that file, I don't worry about whether my accounting of a meeting perfectly matches that of someone else who was there, and there is no incentive for us to be efficient in our work for that client because we know that whether we spend 3 hours or 9 hours writing that motion, the amount our firm gets paid is the same and nobody will be questioning whether it should have taken us that long to complete. The lack of client oversight over our bills might seem great to the client, but it prevents us from being as efficient or cost conscious as we would be for a client under a regular arrangement.

So, while I agree with the premise of the article that the billable hour method of capturing costs is outdated and problematic and needs to be revised, I don't know that flat rate arrangements are the way that clients and firms should go. I would much rather see some sort of apportionment of arrangement where the firm determines an overall number of hours that I spent on client X's work over the year, calculates the percentage of my salary that should come from that client's billing, and then somehow determines an appropriate amount to bill that client for the work that I did. The problem is that law firms want their money now now NOW and do not want to take such a long term retrospective view to billing. (As opposed to attorney salary and bonus, where long term retrospective views are all the rage!)

I don't know what the answer is, but there's got to be a better way. I and virtually every lawyer I know are so incredibly tired of billing our time that I think most of us would take a hefty pay cut if it menat nobody would ever again demand an accounting of what we worked on. It is THAT soul-suckingly awful to do every day. And if virtually every other industry in the world can find a way to be productive and profitable without such an arcane way of seeking payment for services rendered, so can we. Someone just needs to figure out how.