Our friends at Bitter Lawyer have put their comedic spin on the issue du jour (or the issue des annees, considering how long this horse has been getting beaten) – killing the billable hour. We’ll start with the conclusion so readers remember that the article is a vivisection of the practice, not a primer on getting over:
No one likes this shit. It’s offensive, backhanded and creepy. And what’s its root cause? The billable hour. A compensation system built to reward inefficiency, married to a profession providing endless pretexts for needless work and granting its abusers impenetrable deniability.
You know this is a sophisticated analysis when the author uses references to comic strips from the early 20th century. At #3 on the list of hour-padding misdeeds, we have “Volunteering.”
We kill each other in open court, but when it comes time for one of us to prepare an order for the judge’s signature or a first draft of a settlement agreement, we’re suddenly doing an “Alphonse & Gaston” routine with one another.
“Oh, I’ll take the first crack at drafting the agreement.”
“No, allow me. I’ve done one in a similar case before.”If your opponent crafts the initial version of anything, he gets the lion’s share of billable time out of the project. In the case of a settlement agreement, doing the first draft can be the better part of a day’s worth of billables.
Around here, we’d probably have just quoted the 1986 Danny DeVito/Joe Piscopo “Thank YOU, Mr. Acavano” routine from Wise Guys. More excerpts and analysis, after the jump.
At #4, Double Dipping
The quickest way to stack up billable hours is a traveling assignment. If your opponent demands you take deposition halfway across the country, don’t fight him. It’s an economic opportunity where you bill for every minute of the travel. Then stack on that all of the time you spend on other clients’ cases during the trip. Using this approach a twelve-hour trip from Philadelphia to Detroit for a deposition can net a total of seventeen billable hours.
This one has been around for a long, long time. Cameron Stracher (Amherst BA, Harvard JD, Covington & Burling, Iowa MFA) addressed this topic at length ten years ago in his semi-autobiographical book Double Billing.
From an associate’s perspective, billing for travel is a freebie; not billing for travel, a calamity. If you can bill for travel time, then everything you do, even if it’s only reading the newspaper on the airplane, is chargeable to the client. When I went to Detroit, I billed twelve hours that first day, but only eight of those hours were real work. If you can’t bill for travel, then all your time in a taxi, in traffic, at the airport, on a plane, in transit to your destination is wasted. Instead of billing twelve hours for an eight-hour day, you bill eight hours for a twelve-hour day. Imagine your unhappiness.
Stracher may well be the master of double billing. Back in 2001, he went back to the well for a short piece for the NY Times, entitled “How to Bill 25 Hours in One Day.” Don’t say we didn’t warn you, though. A quick Google search will yield hundreds of results for lawyers who have been disbarred for overbilling. The one most of our audience should remember is Carlos Spinelli-Noseda, formerly of Sullivan & Cromwell, who admitted to overbilling by $500,000.
Head over to Bitter Lawyer for the rest of the list. And don’t forget, clients read, too.
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First off, you guys at BigLaw forget that most firms aren't BigLaw and never need to take 12 hour road-trips where we lodge in fancy hotels with free breakfast. I apply the billable hour at my 2-person firm. There is no better method. Period. Sure, democracy sucks too. But does that mean we start re-thinking communism?
Come on now, let's put this ridiculous topic behind us and find something legit to blog about.
We write about what we know, which is BigLaw. Sure, the billable hour may work in other contexts, but that's not our background or our audience. I'm actually on the client side right now, so finding a better solution isn't ridiculous to me.
Carolyn Elefant writes extensively about solo practice and small firms. You should definitely check out her blog if that's your area of interest. http://www.myshingle.com/
Thanks for the feedback.
I was always lead to believe that size doesn't matter. At least that's what my girlfriends tell me.
All kidding aside, perhaps it's more the problem of your firm's policies than the billable hour itself. I already follow Carolyn. She's great. Thanks.