Taxation & Estate Planning

Alternative Billing Arrangements

By Joel A. Schoenmeyer

This article -- on the topic of the possible death of billable hours -- is pretty interesting.

I wrote about billing arrangements (and the problems with them) here. As I said there, I'm not sure that billable hours per se are the problem. Rather, the problem is attorneys who bill clients for .25 hours for a 3-minute phone call. (You can do the math -- if an attorney bills at $500 per hour and bills .25 hours for a 3-minute phone call, that's $112.50 for 3 minutes.) That type of behavior is unethical in any environment, and will cause clients to leave when the economy is bad. Ditto with ridiculously high billing rates. I'm at $225 per hour now, but I know attorneys with similar amounts of experience who charge $300 per hour more; I know more senior attorneys who are within shouting distance of $1,000 per hour. The fact is that, once you get to a certain level of experience, I'm not sure what you as a client are paying for. A fancy office? Artwork on the wall? Your attorney's second or third home? The ability to say "I'm represented by Fancy & Shmancy, Attorneys at Law"?

Full post as published by Death and Taxes Blog on February 06, 2009 (boomark / email).