12. The chilling effect
Putting aside all of the problems of how to properly and honestly measure a lawyer’s time, there is another concern about the billable hours system. If every time a client calls a billable-hour lawyer, there is the knowledge that the meter is ticking, a chill is placed on communications. This means that there is a disincentive to communicate.
On the whole, I think that is a bad thing. I say “on the whole,” because there can be too much communication and there are some clients who, without disincentives, call their lawyer excessively. (Those are the clients a lawyer doesn’t want anyway. I’ll address that later when examining potential pitfalls of flat-rate billing.)
But, in general, a full and frank discussion of a matter results in a better attorney-client relationship and, often, in a better outcome. A lawyer is better apprised of the facts of the case and a client’s needs. The client is better able to form realistic expectations. And it is a whole lot better to review alternative strategies before embarking on a path than to do so later as part of an inquest into what went wrong.
However, it is particularly galling for clients to find charges of $30 or $60 littered around their bills for very short conversations when they are already paying the lawyer a ton of money. Those sorts of charges are what make clients sense that they are being squeezed for every penny possible.
One way of addressing this is for the lawyer simply not to charge for short conversations with the client, even if the fee agreement calls for hourly billing in general. Quite a few lawyers do follow that commendable approach.
But, again, it comes down to the billing climate in which lawyers operate. If they are under pressure to meet targets, or laboring under a self-induced minutes obsession, they might feel that they can’t afford to “give away” any time.
Moreover, the billing-obsessed lawyer may be especially reluctant to let those two-minute phone calls go unbilled. This is because, as noted earlier, those sorts of calls are the most “profitable” of all, since they’re charged at a multiple of the actual length on account of the six- or 12-minute minimum.
Entire contents © 2008 John Derrick