Charge-out rate: Difference between revisions

“''Death to the billable hour!''” they shriek, to whatever patient, spittle-flecked audience they can find. 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.  For no matter how much “everyone” hates them — and not everyone hates them: everyone ''with an opinion on [[LinkedIn]]'' hates them, and that’s different — and no matter how compelling the logic against them, ''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 [[Modernism|modernisers]] and [[Thought leader|thought leaders]].   

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. If you got rid of it that would not stop big law firms sweating their assets. Massacring associates is what they do: [[It is in my nature|''it is in their nature'']].   

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. But, again, this is the faustian deal young Tarquin strikes when he accepts that TC. 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 agree, any time soon, to make ''less'' money off the back of 25-year-olds it hires as cannon fodder, in the name of respecting their [[work-life balance]], we humbly suggest you might like to think again.  

Anyone who has spent any time in the trenches during a full-scale financial services transaction will know what uncontrollable monsters these things can be. Not only is there the [[Thirteenth law of worker entropy|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 [[Conflict of interest|conflicting interests]] and [[Agency problem|agents]].  

All of this takes time, and imposing an hourly rate is a neat, effective, and sobering hedge for a [[law firm]] against being taken advantage of by other participants with their own 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.

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” — [[Lazy|lazy people]] like yours truly with no stomach for the paper-war pantomime — but in any case you will not find senior partners of white-shoe law firms — or, really, those who ''aspire'' to being partners of white-shoe firms — railing against charge-out rates.

The time-and-attendance model is embedded deep in the [[Pace layering|cultural layers of commerce]]. It will long outlive trendy types who predict its demise.

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*[[Magic circle law firm]]

*[[Bernard Madoff]]

*[[Pace layering]]

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