Still Hating America.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
It's 300/month for a full year. Not easy. I worked on a merger where I billed 300 a month for several months straight. It was exhausting, and not something I'd want to do. But it was "easy" in the sense that there was so much work to do that the hours added up. Not all of it was full engagement--for example, the daily meetings and conference calls with multiple lawyers, the travel, etc., all was billable.

I don't have much tolerance for such stuff, but I know others do, so I could see someone doing that for a full year.

Um, 300 x 12 = 3600.

I wouldn't timmy you on this if you only did it once, and would have assumed you meant 200. But you did it twice.

As an associate, an honest 200 was not rare at all; a couple big deals going on simultaneously and you hit the number, even if some of the work was mind-numbing. As a partner, 200 is not possible. Too many little things to deal with every days. To say nothing of the internet time.

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
It depends. I can believe it if they have a big deal or big litigation that takes a long time, especially if they're lead counsel and thus constantly meeting/calling/etc.

I don'tbelieve it for any first/second year associate who claims to do it just for boxreview, though.

Why isn't this simply an issue of the elasticity of demand for legal services? The extent to which it* hits profits versus prices seems like it would be dependent on that.

Or do markets not apply to legal services?

*ETA the additional cost of doing pro bono of any kind

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Um, 300 x 12 = 3600.

I wouldn't timmy you on this if you only did it once, and would have assumed you meant 200. But you did it twice.
.

And my math error undermines my point how? A fortiorari

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
And my math error undermines my point how? A fortiorari

Doesn't undermine it at all - I thought I was concurring, though with the 200 number in place.

But, when you next post a detailed economic analysis, I'm not trusting the math.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
It's 300/month for a full year. Not easy. I worked on a merger where I billed 300 a month for several months straight. It was exhausting, and not something I'd want to do. But it was "easy" in the sense that there was so much work to do that the hours added up. Not all of it was full engagement--for example, the daily meetings and conference calls with multiple lawyers, the travel, etc., all was billable.

I don't have much tolerance for such stuff, but I know others do, so I could see someone doing that for a full year.

What do you think the ratio of people with that very unique tolerance/ability to the number of people billing that level of hours would be?

Also, litigation's a different animal. Nobody's doing 200 a month of any lit service worth paying for.

[Adder]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Um, 300 x 12 = 3600.

I wouldn't timmy you on this if you only did it once, and would have assumed you meant 200. But you did it twice.

As an associate, an honest 200 was not rare at all; a couple big deals going on simultaneously and you hit the number, even if some of the work was mind-numbing. As a partner, 200 is not possible. Too many little things to deal with every days. To say nothing of the internet time.

I don't know. I observe a lot of partners who are on the phone ten to twelve hours a day, the whole day. I have also reviewed the bills prepared by some of them, and have never observed anything suspicious.

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Also, litigation's a different animal. Nobody's doing 300 a month of any lit service worth paying for.

I didn't say the 300 hours of work I did was all valuable. In fact, I'm quite sure it wasn't. But even if none of it was, the $500k fees it generated over a few months was most certainly a rounding error in the overall deal value. The client was satisfied with the outcome.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Also, litigation's a different animal. Nobody's doing 200 a month of any lit service worth paying for.

That depends entirely on the kind of litigation. Big cases create lots of grunt work, which can keep lots of NY GAs busy for a long time, during which they will never see sunlight or the inside of a courtroom.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
I didn't say the 300 hours of work I did was all valuable. In fact, I'm quite sure it wasn't. But even if none of it was, the $500k fees it generated over a few months was most certainly a rounding error in the overall deal value. The client was satisfied with the outcome.

Ah, but that's not the contract. If the contract's hourly, the presumption is the services charged aren't value, but unit based. I have heard many people in the firms where I've worked use the excuse "Well, we gave the client a great result." Indeed. Next time, ask the client for a value based billing agreement.

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Ah, but that's not the contract. If the contract's hourly, the presumption is the services charged aren't value, but unit based. I have heard many people in the firms where I've worked use the excuse "Well, we gave the client a great result." Indeed. Next time, ask the client for a value based billing agreement.

This is becoming circular. The client got 300 hours of work. It was all good-quality work. It was not all work that added any value to the overall matter, other than indirectly (e.g., those 500 boxes have nothing of interest; I now know what some of the partners are thinking about strategy wise). I'm not ashamed of it, nor do I need to rely on an excuse that the result was "great." They were billed for work I did, per the billing arrangement.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Adder
It is a tribute to the honor of our nation's military pilots that a C-130 didn't mysteriously disappear somewhere in the Caribbean.

Which is exactly what would have happened if I was flying.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
This one is amusing:

http://www.sptimes.com/2006/08/30/images/farmer.pdf

He should have left out the "I have no ill will line..."

It looks like he's fried the bastard repeatedly over this one.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Sure, but so is the tuition of the partner's daughter at prep school, or her donation to Planned Parenthood. I'm not sure the linkage is much more direct than that.

I don't think so either. (Although the costs (which do include the opportunity costs of attorney time) may have the effect of pushing up billing rates down the line to recoup expenses/restore the old profit margin.)

I'd just rather fight the fight on grounds of "Maybe so, but pro bono is the right thing to do" than argue that pro bono work imposes no marginal costs on the firm.

S_A_M

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
I don't think so either. (Although the costs (which do include the opportunity costs of attorney time) may have the effect of pushing up billing rates down the line to recoup expenses/restore the old profit margin.)

I'd just rather fight the fight on grounds of "Maybe so, but pro bono is the right thing to do" than argue that pro bono work imposes no marginal costs on the firm.

No one disputes that pro bono imposes some marginal out-of-pocket costs (and real opportunity costs) on the firm. But you were saying that it imposes costs on the firm's clients. That makes as much as sense as suggesting that a partner's decision to give money to charity imposes costs on firm clients because he's going to need to raise billing rates to increase his draw accordingly.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Nobody in history has ever billed an actual 2000 truly billable hours in a year. I don't how low you set the bar on what's considered billable. When you slice out all the fuckaround time, daydreaming, internet time, personal phone calls, bathroom trips, lunches, etc... even the bare bones honest bills of those 10% of attys who don't use the industry standard 10-20% "pad" already have an inherent 10% fluff rate built into them.

I agree with you that there is a certain amount of "fluff" built in, in the sense that no one can keep precise/exact track of the time spent actually doing productive work, and most lawyers will probably err on the side of inclusion.

I don't agree with or understand your "industry standard pad" theory. You seem to have worked in a very different industry.

S_A_M