The Wall St. Journal Law Blog reports
on Amtrak’s woes in overpaying law firms millions of dollars between
2002 and 2005. Apparently, Amtrak didn’t work hard enough in examining
its attorneys’ bills. My simple question is: why should clients even have
to scrutinize their law firm bills? The answer is they do because many
law firms, particularly large firms, have an inclination to ’round up’
in billing (to meet minimum billable-hour requirements). And they also have a strange inability to find efficient
solutions to legal problems, especially when they bill by the hour.
Large law firms have a lot of overhead to carry, which is the biggest
reason for these undesirable tendencies.
But many clients are getting wise and hiring good lawyers who strive
for efficiency. One way to assess how much a lawyer values efficiency
is to examine how much overhead he or she carries. If you hire a good
lawyer who believes in efficiency then you won’t have to spend so much
time auditing their bills. In fact, you might not have to spend any
time at all.
P.S. If you're a practicing lawyer, check out this Law Practice Assessment . After answering a few questions, you'll get detailed recommendations for improving five key areas of your practice.
Sorry about that second link:
here it is again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeIxHQ-lkuM
Ernie,
Lawyers are not the only ones that like to overbill. I guess it is the american way?
If you ever want make a lot of money. Don’t hire this guy,
In a perfect world, they shouldn’t have to scrutinize anyone’s bills, but that isn’t the case. When I was taking a break from practice and doing some claim management work a couple of years ago, I had to review legal bills on litigated files. My problem wasn’t inefficient use of time, and I didn’t want to start second guessing my hired guns on time required to do a task right, but just sloppy billing and a lack of review.
The consistent issues were entries that obviously had nothing to do with the file in question and the same task entered multiple times. The only time I questioned actual time was when a new associate had the nerve to charge twice as much time to summarize a depo as to actually do the depo, and that bill was adjusted. Don’t know whether it was a typo or not, but if accurate something that glaring should have been explained in a note with the bill, and not just buried in the detail.