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5. The highly questionable
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12-minute rule
The distortion caused by billing increments becomes even worse when lawyers use 12-minutes as the minimum and incremental units of time.
Excuses for the 12-minute minimum
The 12-minute — or 0.2-hour — minimum is surprisingly common. Under that scenario, a lawyer making a three-minute phone call will bill for 0.2 hours (i.e., 12 minutes) — even though the timekeeping and billing software allows for increments of half that amount.
The usual justification for the 12-minute minimum is something like this: “Time is lost ramping up for, and ramping down from, each task. The three-minute phone call actually takes more than three minutes out of my day. It disrupts my flow on the work I was doing immediately before and afterward. This needs to be compensated.”
A flaw in this reasoning is that it assumes that the three-minute call does interrupt some other flow. But the call could be preceded by a task that was already complete — another phone call for example. It is fanciful to suggest that all short calls somehow disrupt some other activity.
Also, there is already compensation when, say, a three-minute call is billed as 0.1 hours — i.e., the difference between three and six minutes. One doesn’t need to go all the way up to 0.2 hours even if one were to accept the “ramping up” and “ramping down” premise.
Furthermore, one hopes that the timekeeper who insists on 12-minute minimums will be as avid at stopping the clock on a task that is interrupted as at starting it on the three-minute call that disrupts the flow. Otherwise, the lawyer would be selling the same time twice. Consider the following example...
A lawyer starts work on a document for Client A at 2:00 PM and finishes at 3:00 PM. So the lawyer bills Client A for an hour. Sounds fair.
But in the middle, the lawyer took a three-minute call relating to Client B — not a huge interruption, but still enough to bill Client B for 0.1 hours or, maybe, 0.2 under the 12-minute rule. But that may not be enough for the lawyer to reduce the one-hour charge to Client A — after all, it was “only” a three-minute interruption.
So this lawyer has defied nature in extracting more than sixty minutes from the hour. The practice of law can seem like a time machine.
The indefensible 12-minute increment
The 12-minute minimum is bad enough. Worse, still, is when not only does time start at 12 minutes, but it also goes up in 12-minute increments. For example, a phone conversation would be billed for no less than 0.2 hours — corresponding to 12 minutes — and, if it ran longer, it would jump to 0.4 hours.
What about 0.3? The whole “ramping up” and “ramping down” argument is inapplicable here — you can’t logically charge for two ramp-ups and ramp-downs with a single conversation. Despite this, some lawyers do, indeed, operate on the basis that time progresses in 12-minute amounts after the first 12 minutes. But others who use 12-minute minimums draw the line at 12-minute increments.
The ethics of 12-minute billing
A word here about ethics. I’ll start with an analogy. I actually do not think that most politicians in this country are corrupt. The number who would take a briefcase full of hundred dollar bills in return for a favor is really quite small.
That said, we live under a system that is, at some level, institutionally corrupt. Money is needed to run politics. Money does not grow on trees. Nor is it funded by the state. So money is donated.
And those who donate the largest amounts are those who hope to buy influence. If they gave the money in briefcases to individual congressmen, it would be criminally corrupt. But we have come up with an elaborate system, which — despite various gray areas — allows money to be given to politicians legally.
Now back to the practice of law. I do not think most lawyers are dishonest or cheats. Some may be, but — in my experience — lawyers are not, collectively, a bad breed of people. However, some operate under a set of rules that, at some level, is institutionally dishonest. This includes rules that make the smallest measurable unit of time 12 minutes.
Fortunately, I don’t think that 12-minute billing is the official practice in most law firms. Corporate clients tend to be savvy buyers of legal services and would rebel if they saw this in fee agreements. But I suspect it is more common at an individual lawyer level. By that, I’m not pointing the finger at solo practitioners, in particular, but also at individual lawyers in firms of all sizes.
Faced with pressure to bill high numbers of hours (a topic I’ll be turning to later), the hungry lawyer needs all the minutes that are out there. The temptation to go up by 12-minute increments proves too much for some to resist.
And the knowledge that it is not all that uncommon allows minute-hungry lawyers to persuade themselves that they are not being individually dishonest but merely conforming to a professional “custom and practice.”
Entire contents © 2008 John Derrick