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Charge-out rate: Difference between revisions
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No matter how much everyone<ref>Not everyone hates them. Everyone ''with an opinion on [[LinkedIn]]'' hates them. This is different.</ref> hates them, and no matter how good the logic against them is, charge-out rates are a brute fact of life. They have survived, and flourished, until now. As brute facts tend to, they have proven adept at resisting the cold hypothetical theorising of modernisers and thought leaders. | No matter how much everyone<ref>Not everyone hates them. Everyone ''with an opinion on [[LinkedIn]]'' hates them. This is different.</ref> hates them, and no matter how good the logic against them is, charge-out rates are a brute fact of life. They have survived, and flourished, until now. As brute facts tend to, they have proven adept at resisting the cold hypothetical theorising of modernisers and thought leaders. | ||
====It’s a means of account==== | ====It’s a means of account==== | ||
Essentially, the billable hour is an internal unit of account: means for those who like to measure, manage and monitor things to make sure the firm is properly sweating its assets. The six-minute unit is not an end in itself, and if you got rid of it that would not stop law firm management sweating their assets. Massacring associates is what they do: it is in their nature. Part of the ''point'' is to weed out the ones who can’t hack it. ''This is elite sport''. Remember: these winsome little lambs whom big law is now tenderising? Short days ago they were elbowing each other in the eye and clambering over their grandmothers’ graves ''just to snag that summer internship''. Getting monstered is part of the deal: if you don’t understand that, or if your mental health isn’t up to it, ''don’t do it''. | |||
Outrage might be informed, too, by how much big law firms ''charge'' for their attorneys’ time, and how little of that gets back to the poor, put-upon attorneys. If | Outrage might be informed, too, by how much big law firms ''charge'' for their attorneys’ time, and how little of that gets back to the poor, put-upon attorneys. Again, this is the deal. Always has been. If you have the game, and the match fitness, to stay with the game, you’ll get yours soon enough. But if you think Coward Slaughter LLP is going to take less money any time soon? Think again. | ||
====Alignment of interests==== | ====Alignment of interests==== | ||
Anyone who has spent any time in the trenches of a financial services transaction will know what an uncontrollable monster these things can be. Not only is there the extreme over-complicatedness of the legal documents,<ref>Curious? Have a look at [https://www.ise.ie/debt_documents/ListingParticulars_cd8daa3f-24e8-419a-819a-cf3e23a03271.PDF this 370-page beauty].</ref> but the unmanageable interests of all the conflicting interests and agents. The law firm holding the pen has no control over how idiotic its own client is, how convoluted its instructions, how contradictory, how often it will change its mind, and who is really steering the ship. It has even less over the attitude of other counterparties to the deal, and even less over their legal advisors. Much of modern legal practice involves disentangling stupid questions, trying to make head or tail of gnomic pronouncements from some senior luminary on the client’s upper management who doesn’t have the first clue about the deal or for that matter the business, waiting fruitlessly on clear news of what is meant to be happening, and fending off frustration techniques from opposing lawyers that are precisely designed to run down the clock and rack up legal expense. All of this takes time, and imposing an hourly rate is a neat, effective, and sobering hedge for a firm against being taken advantage of utterly by other participants with their own personal agendas. Fixed fees, conditional fee arrangements, percentages and caps are necessarily blunter tools, inviting more after-the-fact complaint, than actual hours spent. ''You obliged my associate to spend seventy five hours re-writing legal docs because your original instructions were unclear'' is quite hard to argue against. | Anyone who has spent any time in the trenches of a financial services transaction will know what an uncontrollable monster these things can be. Not only is there the extreme over-complicatedness of the legal documents,<ref>Curious? Have a look at [https://www.ise.ie/debt_documents/ListingParticulars_cd8daa3f-24e8-419a-819a-cf3e23a03271.PDF this 370-page beauty].</ref> but the unmanageable interests of all the conflicting interests and agents. The law firm holding the pen has no control over how idiotic its own client is, how convoluted its instructions, how contradictory, how often it will change its mind, and who is really steering the ship. It has even less over the attitude of other counterparties to the deal, and even less over their legal advisors. Much of modern legal practice involves disentangling stupid questions, trying to make head or tail of gnomic pronouncements from some senior luminary on the client’s upper management who doesn’t have the first clue about the deal or for that matter the business, waiting fruitlessly on clear news of what is meant to be happening, and fending off frustration techniques from opposing lawyers that are precisely designed to run down the clock and rack up legal expense. All of this takes time, and imposing an hourly rate is a neat, effective, and sobering hedge for a firm against being taken advantage of utterly by other participants with their own personal agendas. Fixed fees, conditional fee arrangements, percentages and caps are necessarily blunter tools, inviting more after-the-fact complaint, than actual hours spent. ''You obliged my associate to spend seventy five hours re-writing legal docs because your original instructions were unclear'' is quite hard to argue against. | ||