I enjoyed the recent debate triggered by reports of the US lawsuit accusing DLA Piper of over billing. As expected the comments included a few laments about lawyers’ strange habit of charging clients for inputs in the form of billable hours – strange in the sense that when we buy a quart of milk we expect to pay for milk, not bushels of livestock feed and hours of dairy workers’ time.
Like you, I’ve heard and read that the profession falls short in failing to invent and adopt different charging models. What I notice in these discussions is how the critics of the billable hour often fail to grasp the bigger part of the story – what it is that clients expect in exchange for what they pay.
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