Doing Time

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This publication contains my personal views and not necessarily those of my employer. Since I am a lawyer, I do need to tell you that this publication is not intended as legal advice or as an advertisement for legal services.

Doing Time
What do lawyers and prisoners have in common? They share a fixation on time. Both groups are expected to spend a certain amount of time — whether it be expressed as target billable hours or as sentencing guidelines. However, there is a noteworthy distinction between the groups: prisoners get time off for good behavior.

While this may be an unnecessarily dramatic way to think about our relationship with time, think about it we must. For the last few decades, the billable hour has been the gold standard against we measure a lawyer’s work and worth. The problem is that a fixation on time can get in the way of thinking creatively about how lawyers (and law firms) actually provide value to clients. Increasing numbers of clients are unwilling to pay just to keep us around. They pay us to achieve specific results.

As clients and lawyers think more creatively about alternative fee arrangements, we’re all going to have to reconsider our dependence on the gold standard of time. Perhaps in the process lawyers will free themselves from the need to do time.

[Photo Credit: Matti Mattila]
Published on October 7, 2009 · Filed under: Law Firms; Tagged as: Alternative Billing
4 Comments

http://www.ppcsoft.com/blog Atle Iversen

As a former consultant, billable hours as “doing time” sounds very familiar .

Knowledge management, sharing and increased productivity are not compatible with billable hours; if you do something in half the time, you get half the pay.

However, focusing on value is a totally different matter, and clients should appreciate a focus on value as this gives incentive to become more efficient (which should give the clients more value for less money).

I still find the concept of value hard to explain to many people – unfortunately too many focus on price and cost instead of looking at value….
VMaryAbraham

Atle -

In fairness, some people never learn what is truly valuable. Sometimes it's worth it to spend a few cents more to buy some additional security. At other times the truly valuable thing is quick delivery. The key here is that we've been misusing time as a proxy for value in all cases when we really should be identifying what's valuable on a case by case basis.

- Mary
VMaryAbraham

Atle -

To be honest, some people never learn what is truly valuable. For example, sometimes it's worth it to spend a few cents more to buy some additional security. At other times the truly valuable thing is quick delivery. The key here is that we've been misusing time as a proxy for value in all cases when we really should be identifying what's valuable on a case by case basis.

- Mary
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