Reply to Big law--how many hours have you billed so far?

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[quote=Anonymous]Billable hours are a losing game.  Time is your inventory and you can never make more of it.

I don't see much relationship between cutting or not cutting corners and hourly billing, you get to a certain point and the client is complaining about the bill, not that you didn't cut corners.  And then time is written off.

Lawyers (most anyway) are not stupid, they know how to make enough hours appear on a timesheet if needed unless they're truly not busy at all.

Conversely, when I was the first lawyer in my office to use a computer more than 20 yrs. ago, I told them it would pay for itself in 90 days.  The first time I had to due a preliminary injunction/temporary restraining order application & motion it took about 4 hrs.  (would have taken longer to write it out, not to mention waiting for it to come back from word processing).  Second time the same kind of application came up in a similar issue I had to do about an hour of new research and because I had the work already saved, adapted it to a new motion ready to go in 1 hour.

You can bet the work (which was successful) was worth multiples to the client of the billable time I spent on it.  The firm was not billing purely on hourly time so that was marked up substantially.

Anyway ... it's a horrible way to live and a horrible model that fails to measure outcomes.  I turned out more work more efficiently than others in less time but by that measure I was "less productive."  Nonsense.

I think the billable hour model is a treadmill, but the profession continues to struggle to get free of it.[/quote]

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