Hi there,
I was chatting with a senior member of our Legal Advisory Team here at PERSUIT last week.
She’s a lawyer who left a traditional firm after suffering the burnout so many people experience in that environment.
She said something I’ve been thinking about all week:
“The billable hour is a symbol,” she told me. “It represents the old way of doing things — a way we need to move on from.”
I think that’s perfectly stated.
I say that as a former BigLaw partner, someone who benefited greatly over the years from the "old way" of doing things.
In the old way, firms win clients through personal relationships. Then they bill those clients by the hour.
But here’s a truth about that world that no one likes to talk about:
The billable hour creates an incentive not to improve, innovate, or find better ways of working.
Why work faster, better, or more efficiently when doing so will cost money?
Why scope a matter up front and ask for competitive fee proposals — rather than simply billing by the hour — when doing so feels like it will risk the relationships you have with your firms?
As long as legal clings to a system that discourages innovation, our industry will continue to be slow, stagnant, and inefficient.
It will also continue to perpetuate our burnout culture — and all the negative impacts that come with it.
Moving away from the billable hour — by itself — won’t cure all our problems in legal.
But it's the change that needs to happen first — to create a world where outcomes are what matter — not hours spent in front of a computer.
My vision — and PERSUIT's — is to see the industry move beyond the old way of doing things.
To a way that moves past long-established, relationship-driven awards of work, replacing it with a fairer, more transparent process, one where the firms and lawyers who are best placed — with the right skills and experience — rightly win the business.
Bias and subjectivity are minimized as much as possible in the new way of doing things. And equity, fairness, and trust are the cornerstones of collaborative, strategic relationships.
That's the change we're working to bring to the world of legal.
And sooner rather than later.
-Jim Delkousis
Founder and CEO
PERSUIT | www.persuit.com
P.S.
Moving away from the billable hour means getting knowledgable about alternative fee arrangements.
If you've never used an AFA but you'd like to know more, we have an in-depth AFA guide written by two of our most experienced in-house legal experts.
It’s a free resource. You can download it here:
I hope you find it useful.
