81,840
edits
Charge-out rate: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
||
| Line 16: | Line 16: | ||
A bit too much hot-air and methane, I suppose. | A bit too much hot-air and methane, I suppose. | ||
===The end of the charge-out rate is nigh=== | |||
Around the [[LinkedIn|marketplace of ideas]], you will see the occasional sandwich board-donning lunatic who will preach, righteously, that the end of this tyrannical regime is nigh. This argument, proceeding as it does from the purest precepts of cold logic is, on its own terms, unimpeachable and therefore, in the real world, utterly hopeless. | |||
No matter how much everyone 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. They are not going away. There are several reasons for this. | |||
====It’s a means of account==== | |||
We suspect much of the hostility against the charge-out rate is really hostility at how tyrannical big law firms are to the poor little lambs who work for them, and outrage by clients to how much big law firms ''charge''. If that is right, the humble unit of account is an odd target for umbrage. Say what you mean. | |||
====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. | |||
====Lawyers in private practice secretly quite like them==== | |||
There is something of the [[labour theory of value]] to hours clocked up. Native private practitioners actually like the feeling of accomplishment and self-worth that comes from spending 2,500 hours a year slogging away at meaningless textual rockfaces. Those who argue against them are talking their own book: mainly technologists and other refugees from “big law” you will not find senior partners of white-shoe law firms — or, really, those that aspire to being partners of white-shoe firms — railing against charge-out rates. | |||
{{sa}} | {{sa}} | ||
| Line 21: | Line 31: | ||
*[[Magic circle law firm]] | *[[Magic circle law firm]] | ||
*[[Bernard Madoff]] | *[[Bernard Madoff]] | ||
{{ref}} | |||