A brave articling student once quipped about me that, “if you say, ‘pro bono’ near Murray, you’d better be talking about Sonny and Cher.” Now that was a tad unfair. It was not that I was against our firm doing pro bono work, but I did want us to be doing it for people who could not afford a lawyer, as opposed to people who were just cheap and did not value what we did.
A young lawyer named Eve called me today about a fee dispute. She had quoted an hourly rate without providing an estimate and had issued an interim bill for the time that she spent. The client did not think that it should have cost that much but was willing to pay it. However, the client wanted the rest of the work done within her budget.
I was speaking to a recent retiree from a Canadian Big Law firm the other day, and she introduced a new law firm concept to me, being that of the “Practice Assistant.” Apparently at her firm they did away with the concept of Legal Assistants (formerly, a “secretary” for you very old folks) and replaced it with a Practice Assistant, or “PA.”
Back in the good old days, I used to bill by the hour, just like every other lawyer. I had a simple retainer agreement with my clients which essentially provided that they agreed to pay my hourly rate for all of the hours that I spent on their matters.
When the work was done, I would send my bill to the client calculated by multiplying the time spent by my hourly rate. Then my client would pay the bill. Life was simple.
I once proposed raising our hourly rates and was met with furious resistance by the head of our litigation department who assured me that no assessment officer would ever permit lawyers to charge the amounts that I had proposed. He was a brilliant litigator and he was completely correct. However, he was not much of a businessperson and had not considered how rarely our accounts were assessed. I was more than willing to lose all of the assessments and rake in the extra dollars on more than 99% of our files.
“Fools believe silence is a void needing to be filled; the wise understand there’s no such thing as silence.”
Michael J. Sullivan, Age of Myth
Client: Why do I want to pay for two lawyers to be in this meeting?
Some years ago I went off on a cruise and took the opportunity to have some renovations done at my house while I was away. George did a great job on the drywall, but when he sent me the invoice, he made one tiny little mistake. Instead of giving me the invoice for the construction work, he sent me an invoice for his “other business” which, unbeknownst to me, was producing racy videos. He was quite embarrassed when I asked him what a “panty teaser” was and what it had to do with my ceiling. I never did find out whether my house was the setting for his cinematographic masterpiece.
When I practised law in Mississauga, Ont., our fees were cheap compared to the Toronto firms, and kind of expensive compared to firms in places like Guelph, Belleville and Kingston. I occasionally wondered whether my clients might prefer to deal with firms in smaller cities at lower rates. Then I would reassure myself that doing so would be terribly inconvenient for them and that they would rather pay more to deal with me.
Now I am not so sure.
Since lawyers tend to think that they know a great deal more than they do about just about everything, they often choose to do things themselves rather than pay money to experts to do them.
One of the things that lawyers typically do poorly is performance reviews.
Near the end of my career, at a time when I frequently congratulated myself (since no one else would listen) about how brilliant I was at dealing with clients, I lost a long-standing client who I will call Charles. I should have fired Charles years before and was holding onto for some twisted sentimental reason.