Boo to Billable Hours

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw

Appellate lawyer and author John Derrick has asked us to put in a link to his book Boo to Billable Hours: A Lawyer’s Guide to Better Billing, the contents of which are available on his website for free.  We don’t usually do commercial endorsements, but, as far as I can tell, free in this case means free.  So why not?

Here’s the blurb:

THE BILLABLE HOUR dominates the legal profession, but is gradually eating away at its soul. It chills the attorney-client relationship. It penalizes efficient lawyers, while rewarding plodding ones. It leads to arbitrary, irrational, and suspect results, in which time is distorted and sometimes invented. It disconnects the amount that is charged from the value delivered. And it fails to produce what it promises, transparency. Its effects are all the worse in law-firm pyramids that impose excessive billing requirements. This straight-talking book critically dissects the practice of billing by the hour, examining how time is actually recorded in a variety of contexts that raise ethical as well as practical concerns. The book is not all about criticism. It also advocates alternatives that shift the focus away from time expended and onto value delivered.