He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.
Sun-Tzu
To fully appreciate and understand the challenge of How To Alternative Bill, we should explore the various aspects of the challenge. This means we should explore all the reasons lawyers and firms have not embraced new ways of billing…
Although Toby is the master of this discussion, I thought I’d chime in with some open-ended questions of my own. There has been a lot of talk about attorneys moving away from the billable hour method and look toward either flat rate or some type of maximum billable rate in order to coax more…
Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shift theory says that once a system (usually a scientific school of thought) has answered all the questions it can and then created a bunch of questions it cannot answer, a shift occurs and a new system emerges designed to answer these new questions. These shifts occur over time as schools of…
The vast number of posts and articles on alternative billing focus on what law firms should be doing. Law firms need to figure out alternative billing. They need to figure out how to make money and save clients’ money at the same time. Especially large firms (a.k.a. BigLaw) need to offer this up to clients…
Law firms and clients for years have treated alternative billing (a.k.a. NOT hourly billing) much like a junior high school dance. At the Junior High Dance the boys stand on one side of the room and the girls on the other. Each side talks about how they would like to dance, but when it comes…
I continue to hold out hope that alternative billing methods will gain a true foot-hold in the legal profession. Thus far, my hopes have been dashed. Yet the possibility of this type of change continues to intrigue me.
From all that I hear, more sophisticated clients will have alternative billing as a key question on…
