Long ago, when it came to billing, lawyers addressed precedents in one of two ways:
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Who’s Zooming Who?
Category: Legal Fees
Many of you will be familiar with the old saying (sometimes attributed to John Adams and other times to Winston Churchill) to the effect that “if you are not a socialist at age 20, you have no heart, but if you are still a socialist at age 30, you have no brain.”
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Docketing For Dummies
I never met a lawyer who loved to docket their time, but I have met a number of lawyers (myself included) who were very good at it. I met many, many more lawyers who were not so good at it.
Maybe someday we will be completely rid of the billable hour, but even if that comes to pass, it will still be important for lawyers to be able to analyze how they are spending their time, if only to understand how to set fixed fees.
So, there we are. We all hate docketing. We all need to be good at it. Here it is. Fully explained. In small words. At last.
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Playing The Price is Wrong
“The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten” is a quote frequently attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Quite true, but it is more complicated than that when we are dealing with things, such as legal services, that the consumer often does not understand.
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The Litigator’s Dream Client
Back in grade two, the class bully and I got hauled off the principal’s office who demanded to know why we were fighting in the school yard. I explained, “he said shut up. I said make me. He was making me.” I learned fairly early in life that our words and actions have consequences.
Years ago, a young person I know was quite proud to show me his first credit card. I was underwhelmed and said: “Big deal. Anyone can get a credit card with their own name on it. The trick is to get a credit card with someone else’s name on it.”
I was reminded of that incident recently when I got a notice in the mail from a major insolvency firm telling me that a fund which I had unwisely invested in was insolvent, the insolvency firm had been appointed as the receiver, and a large law firm has been appointed as ‘representative counsel.’ Now I had reason to worry that all was lost.
“Our policy is to push the work down to the least expensive professional resource who can provide an excellent work product, and by doing so you get the best value for your money.”
Said every partner in a law firm, ever. And they mean it when they say it. That is in fact their policy. And in theory, some day they will figure out how to manage their law firm so that they can consistently comply with that policy. Of course, there is a difference between theory and practice. For example, in theory communism works. Not so much in practice.
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Estimates or Guesstimates?
Every time I phone a call centre for just about any company, it turns out that they are experiencing a higher volume of calls than anticipated, and although my call is important to them, they must keep me on hold for a very long time. It really makes you wonder why, after all of this time, they have not yet started anticipating a higher volume of calls and hiring more staff. Especially since my call is so important to them. I know that something does not quite add up, even if I have not zeroed in on the exact problem. I suspect that it has something to do with them lying to me and my call not actually being all that important to them.
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Live and Die by the Immoral Sword
When I completed my Articles long ago, I was not hired back. It was a time of economic recession and jobs were difficult to come by. I sent out many application letters and eventually accepted an offer at a small suburban firm. The day after I accepted the job, I received a phone call from one of Canada’s largest law firms offering me an interview. I politely declined and said that I had already accepted a position. A family member who will go unnamed thought that I was crazy, but I had given my word and I was not going to break it.
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Putting In Time
Back when I started practicing law, I used to record my time on a docket sheet stapled to the inside front cover of each file. When it came time to bill the file, all of the information that I needed was there for me to use, but I was the only one who had it. Firm management did not have it. They could not tell me that my docketed time for the month was too low, or that I had recorded less time than last month or how my work in process compared to the same month of the year before. They could not easily compare my docketed time to what I had billed and tell me that my write-offs were too high, and they certainly could not look at my work in process and easily tell me how I was doing compared to other associates.