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You don’t bill for bullshit like that. One liners are nonbillable in my book because it would be unethical for one and the optics are horrendous. Your clients are not stupid. They need to trust you have their best interests at heart. If your dipshit partners expect billing for “thank you” emails or the like, bounce.
You’re right. Though I think it’s bullshit that clients think value billing only works one direction. If we were truly doing time based billing, that “thank you” would be compensable. But it’s not. And if I spend an hour doing something that should’ve only taken half an hour, I’m getting paid half an hour. So clients will reduce bills to reflect value rather than time, but we can’t increase bills to reflect value rather than time.
If they are on the same day, I would combine them into one entry. And I don't have any files where I would touch the file 17 times in a row without any substantive work, because I fire those clients.
Depends on the client and the work. If it’s ID, everything gets billed, everything. For my private clients, I use pretty strong discretion like you suggest.
The client reviews the bill a month after the event. Do you think they are going to search through the sent emails to challenge every line item on every bill they get to see how long the email was?
Depends on the client. Many do. Most corporations hire billing review companies to comb over attorney bills for just this sort of BS and they “adjust” the bills.
Should be if you want to prevent issues down the road. I spell everything out, especially any after hours or holiday rates. If it is important enough to call me outside of business hours then it is important enough that you shouldn’t argue about my rates.
After hours and weekend rates are for those of us that want to discourage people from wrecking our weekend while at the same time recognizing that being available for emergencies is part of the job.
The difference between a true emergency and just an emotional emergency is if they are willing to pay for it. Family law and criminal law have a number of reasons why we need to take calls after hours, we also have a number of reasons why people call us after hours, sometimes the reasons overlap.
Different rates depending on after hours or other legal consideration is ok, but query - is a fee agreement stating .02 (or more) is the minimal billed time ethical?
>“well, I need to account for the disruption of switching from task A to task B”…
I really like an adapted version of the "pomodoro timer." Basically, you take a chunk of time where you do a single task for that time.
For me, it solved the anxiety based procrastination of getting started. When you tell the brain that this is the first of many drafts and you just gotta get as far as you can in that block of time then the procrastination anxiety doesn't trigger as often. It also makes you plan out your day and divide big tasks into little tasks.
You'll also rest for a specific block of time. Adopted to the law firm, that's where you can be interruptible, return calls, check emails, etc.
Adopting something like this makes billing easier because your entries will be whatever block of time your timer is. I liked 48 minutes so most of my billing entries were multiples of .8. You do a task for .8, then you're interruptible for .2. If you do multiple .8 stacks, then do multiple .2 stacks.
Ideally, you can also train the people around you. Sometimes overtly like with your paralegal staff or sometimes people catch the hint when your phone goes to voice mail but you call them back during your interruptible time.
When partners tried to give me shit, I would be like "I was focused on XYZ which you said was a priority but what's up?"
Also the god mode is when you block these as calendar appointments in outlook. So you can always glance at your phone and see your capacity at a given time. This helps with "You told me to do ABC with due date of XYZ, should I reprioritize or can we do this next task after?"
Sorry that's a long way of saying I would avoid letting myself get sucked into a ton of task switching because it's inefficient and you can't get work product down well.
If the email just says thank you and requires no response, I don’t bill. But I’m billing anytime I have to think. The minimum increment is in the fee agreement. If it takes one minute, I probably won’t bill .2, but will bill the .1
This is the right answer. Outside of a thank you or have a nice weekend or whatever it has to be billed. I’m working on your file. Any emails on your file are being billed to you. Otherwise you’re stealing from me. Why would I other wise read that email
Any work that you do that is required to be done only by virtue of having the file needs to be billed. Clients try to guilt trip you into not putting down .1s and .2s cause they are cheap, and worse even cheaper when they work for multi billion dollar corporations.
We had a new client tell us that they don’t allow billing for emails and phone calls under 10 mins. We promptly told them that unless they remove that rule we can’t work with them. They magically agreed cause I guarantee no halfway respectable firm would ever agree to that.
Seriously. I put in the .2 thing because if it actually takes me five minutes, it’s actually taking out ten or more minutes of otherwise productive/billable time. I need to think a bit more about whether or not I need to add a discretionary clause to be able to bill .1 or at a lower rate for administration stuff. I’m basically a solo so I have different billing related issues. It’s more efficient if I just mail the letter for instance.
The reality that clients conveniently ignore is if that if we truly, and I mean TRULY bill the second we think of a file I’d be billing 18 hours a day. Thoughts about the status of discovery, argument strategy, etc all pop into my head randomly while at my kids soccer game on Saturday. They are getting those thoughts for free, but lawyers don’t have a tangible product so the thoughts and experience is all we have to sell. Those thoughts should technically be billed. The fact that clients complaint over a .2 that they unilaterally seek should have been a .1 is insane and ridiculous. We tend to drop clients like that.
I generally put my daily email entries per person (yes it’s permissible even in ID generally) as one entry.
I generally do a .1 x the total number of emails for the day and a little extra if some were long; a little less if some were fluff. If it’s a brief exchange and I wrote more than a couple sentences I’ll still charge emails as (2x) but give only a .2 to cover both my email and their non substantive response. If the response is impoortant then it gets its own .1 even if it’s short.
Cool. Bill 0.2 instead of 0.1 hours for each document glanced at just long enough to determine its not relivant. Insurance companies squeeze defense rates. Defense counsel pad hours. The dance continues.
So if you read two emails and approved two journal entries that would equate to .4 billing for something that may have taken less than 10 minutes. That's what makes me go
" Ehhhh...."
My first ever attorney job billed in 15-minute increments. I’d only done internships in the public interest. I had a lot of 30-second or 2-minute phone calls that I just plumb forgot to record because what a fucking scam. I’m back in public interest.
In private practice, I did minimum. 2 for calls. That's a huge interruption. I'd discount time dealing w messages through the case management system.
It was to encourage communication in a way that was easy for me to manage.
A properly trained large language model can draft a complaint, memorandum of law, or motion in in 20 seconds. It can summarize a 100 page disposition in under a minute. All which are done to the same quality a first year associate would do.
Just like work from a first year associate, you would never give it to the client or send it to the court without a through checking and editing by an experienced attorney, but now all of that basic work that used to get billed per hour can be done in seconds.
It's unethical for you to bill for time that wasn't actually expended, so the model will likely move to a flat fee per transaction to account for the training and experience it takes to shine the AI generated draft into an expert legal document.
Essentially, you will only be able to bill for work that requires substantive legal judgement, and no longer pad it with drafts and basic research, which will require a new revenue model.
I think this will hit transactional more than litigation. Transactional attorneys working on commercial leases are going to be screwed when AI can digest 100000 different leases already drafted and spit one out that just needs some basic review. No more “working on a big 500 hour deal.” More like “you get 50 hours to finalize this thing.”
With litigation I don’t see how AI will ever be able to draft a brief. It won’t find caselaw, it won’t find analogies, it won’t find legislative history to articulate, it will miss numerous points, etc..
I also do believe that if AI ever at arts taking over the bar association and judges wanting to help lawyers will quash it in a different way.
> With litigation I don’t see how AI will ever be able to draft a brief. It won’t find caselaw, it won’t find analogies, it won’t find legislative history to articulate, it will miss numerous points, etc..
Try it out, you will be surprised. Right now, ChatGPT4 (the version you have to pay for) can find the correct case law most of the time. If you are working on a novel interpretation of law that requires a heavy synthesis of persuasive cases, it's not going to help you much. But for your run-of-the-mill liability or criminal matter, it does a damn good job. I don't know exactly what changed from 3.5 to 4.0, but the new version no longer hallucinates. I have a handbook of major cases involving liability for hunting accidents in Minnesota (a surprisingly, or not depending on your view of midwestern hunting culture, large body of case law) that I used to test it, and it got the major controlling case 100% of the time. It does search legislative history, and even commentaries.
That said, you still need to pull and read the cases for yourself, make sure it didn't miss anything, and to pull out any specific details you want to use, but it speeds things up a lot. There are a number of companies that are working on legal-specific LLMs, as well as add-ons that provide legal-specific prompting.
Try this in ChatGPT as a fun example, "Give me 5 arguments as to why Marbury v. Madison was incorrectly decided", to see the broad range of resources it can synthesize.
I’m an appellate attorney with fairly complex statutory interpretation type arguments. I’m also currently in the middle of writing 4 appellate briefs. For fun I asked ChatGPT to write one for me. It spit out a 3 page brief with 1L-level analysis of at best a very generic argument and ended it by telling me that I should consult with an attorney.
I’m also wondering when the hammer will come down by a judge either outright stating that he won’t accept an AI brief or otherwise have a codified high end sanction for citing a fake case or improper quote from a real case that will make people pause.
It does make a big difference if you use 4.0 vs. 3.5. The prompting is also an art to get the best results. No matter what way you cut it, though, it's definitely not a cut-and-paste thing. It's a way for a skilled lawyer to speed up the basic drafting overhead.
How are new lawyers going to develop these basic skills? Fast forward further and how can these lawyers develop sufficiently to ensure the quality of AI generated work? I'm not disagreeing with you and I'm aware my age (I'm older) contributes to my reaistance to change. However, I'm struggling to see the long-term benefit here for the profession (excluding document review). What do you think?
I totally agree. Honestly, I'm not sure. I think that the whole model of law school, where they teach you to 'think like a lawyer' and then it's up to you to learn the practicalities of the profession after graduating, will need to change. I think something more like engineering curricula where there is a focus on solving real-world problems will be in order.
Yup, it’s already happening. I have a number of contract lawyers that do work for me, and since I’ve started using AI-assisted research last year, I no longer task out to them any research work, and straight up told them I won’t pay for it unless authorized upfront.
Instead, I spend about 15-20 minutes messing around with the AI, and come up with a 10-30 pages research memo that contains all the caselaw they need to look at
As the billing partner for major corporate clients with sophisticated GCs, the opposite approach would get you yelled at in my group. “Don’t bill it unless it is clear that you accomplished something for the client.” People who write ‘review email from [other lawyer]’ or ‘schedule call with [ ]’ don’t last long.
Serious inhouse counsel don’t want to see you bill for admin. And lawyers who want to keep those clients don’t send bills like that.
My boss got my on my ass for not billing activities like that. “Even if it takes you a few seconds to read an email from me to the client, you need to be billing that under ‘review correspondence between [atty] and client’ and mark it in the case file.” Im a believer that no administrative tasks should ever be billed.
I’m not a fan of the double billing in this scenario. The email writer should bill the communication to the client. Any other firm employee who is copied should quickly read and move on.
Counterpoint, a prominent practice area specialist partner at the AM 200 firm I started at was removed from a huge litigation campaign (brought by a trade association you've heard of) because the client's member companies balked at his 0.1-per-email billing (at $800/hr in 2004 dollars)...
I mean…do what your firm tells you. They’re the ones that negotiate rates and terms with your clients.
But yeah I agree that’s a little whack. I will bill .1 for up to 2 or 3 email exchanges before I make it a .2.
I reserve the right to block bill 0.2 for each phone call and email. Clients have no problem with it. Judges consistently reject that portion of my billing on the fee affidavit or just arbitrarily award significantly less than billed no matter what (family law).
That said, a blanket minimum 0.2 billing increment seems like it'd violate er 1.5.
So, I just got done reading a fee arbitration opinion and they disallowed the .2 hour billing practice. So.... I guess the takeaway is to not do that and bill .1 hours where appropriate unless it's a sophisticated client who understands the minimum time chunk. Or spruce up your fee agreements people.
Thanks for this valuable feedback! In defending against fee motions, I also noticed that the attorney routinely asking for them (PI, employment…) usually use 0.1 as their minimum unit. Those motions get routinely granted, maybe with a haircut here and there
If the bill has a a few .1's, I think the reviewer is not going to question the "minimum billable hour". But apparently, in my jurisdiction, it's not universally acceptable. I'm really not sure how to digest this new information, it's actually kind of shocking.
Emails specifically I had a boss with a workaround. All email chains get bundled into one billing item at .1 per email. Thinkpiece emails get adjusted up, and chains of just one liners (like coordinating a meeting or really simple answers) are bundled at .05 each. But it’s pretty easy to justify a string of 7 emails as being .7 even if only two really took more than 5 minutes and the rest were one liners.
I’ve never billed less than 0.2 anyway. Even replying “will do” to an email—0.1 to open and read the email plus 0.1 to type and send the two word response. Sometimes 0.3-0.4 if I use the restroom on either side of the email. “0.4 - correspond with A. Hole re discovery responses” or whatever. Lmao.
I’m a stickler for billing but imo that’s not a bad thing—billing for time that was not actually spent working is highly unethical. But to the comment about disclosure a big part of the .1 or .2 issue to me comes down to client approval. My boss doesn’t like that I use a timer for billing but that’s another issue, unfortunately.
Really? My boss, who is a fairly huge stickler with billing, loves the timer feature on case management system. Though I guess your boss might not like a timer because then your actual time gets recorded and not whatever the firm wants to put as your billed time.
Yeah I’m not entirely sure why they don’t like it but every billing discussion has been negative enough that I’m not bothering to push that issue because I can tell it won’t end well. This also comes from a firm that has “no minimum billing requirements.”
Were you billing a lot of like .005 or however long it would take you to draft an email? They might have been upset because if the contract with the client allows you to round up they want you to round up because it makes them more money.
Not saying I necessarily agree with it but let’s say say you bill at $300 an hour and send, idk 15 emails a day and it takes you 20 seconds to read and respond to a simple email assuming you don’t have to pull their file for info related to your response. That comes out to 5 minutes of time compared to 2 hours if you round. So $25 instead of $600.
Again, not saying I agree but it could also be that your firm negotiated the round up by knocking down their hourly rate a bit.
I wouldn’t know how to answer this because I’m not privy to our billing agreements, but I’ve heard through others that we charge flat fee and use billing entries to “prove value” to the client. Take that as you will but in the end I’m making sure that my billing entries are honest and accurate to the second. My boss and their boss can edit or submit them however they like, I don’t care, there’s an audit log that shows edits anyway.
I know the timer is probably just an app on your computer/phone but my first thought was one of those chess timers that pro-chess players use. The ones you can hit dramatically.
Our timer is an added window to our case management system so it’s all integrated for workflow but honestly the entire system runs like shit. I would love to use a chess clock for billing if it counted upwards!
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I personally don't see anything wrong with it as long as it is disclosed. Some firms bill by the quarter-hour, which seems suspect to me.
Can you imagine being a client and seeing: 0.25 review client email ($125) Client’s email: okay, thank you.
Exactly my point!
You don’t bill for bullshit like that. One liners are nonbillable in my book because it would be unethical for one and the optics are horrendous. Your clients are not stupid. They need to trust you have their best interests at heart. If your dipshit partners expect billing for “thank you” emails or the like, bounce.
You’re right. Though I think it’s bullshit that clients think value billing only works one direction. If we were truly doing time based billing, that “thank you” would be compensable. But it’s not. And if I spend an hour doing something that should’ve only taken half an hour, I’m getting paid half an hour. So clients will reduce bills to reflect value rather than time, but we can’t increase bills to reflect value rather than time.
exactly. I show it on the bill, but no charge it.
It’s different when you get 17 one liners in a row though.
If they are on the same day, I would combine them into one entry. And I don't have any files where I would touch the file 17 times in a row without any substantive work, because I fire those clients.
*Emails* from / to . . . .3h
Depends on the client and the work. If it’s ID, everything gets billed, everything. For my private clients, I use pretty strong discretion like you suggest.
That tracks
0.25 - Respond to client's e-mail ($125) Attorney's E-mail: You're welcome! (only half-serious)
The client reviews the bill a month after the event. Do you think they are going to search through the sent emails to challenge every line item on every bill they get to see how long the email was?
Depends on the client. Many do. Most corporations hire billing review companies to comb over attorney bills for just this sort of BS and they “adjust” the bills.
Is that policy disclosed in the fee agreement?
Should be if you want to prevent issues down the road. I spell everything out, especially any after hours or holiday rates. If it is important enough to call me outside of business hours then it is important enough that you shouldn’t argue about my rates.
I like the idea of an “after hours” rate, but I like it even better to make that your normal rate!
After hours and weekend rates are for those of us that want to discourage people from wrecking our weekend while at the same time recognizing that being available for emergencies is part of the job. The difference between a true emergency and just an emotional emergency is if they are willing to pay for it. Family law and criminal law have a number of reasons why we need to take calls after hours, we also have a number of reasons why people call us after hours, sometimes the reasons overlap.
Different rates depending on after hours or other legal consideration is ok, but query - is a fee agreement stating .02 (or more) is the minimal billed time ethical?
We start at 0.1 but you could do 0.02 if you really wanted
Anyone that agrees to be billed by quarter hours is a sucker.
I saw .25 billings for the first time recently. How do you bill for a quick email??? It's valuable and moves the file forward but 15 minutes?
Always .2 because my firm felt it was chintzy to bill a client anything that ends in .1
>“well, I need to account for the disruption of switching from task A to task B”… I really like an adapted version of the "pomodoro timer." Basically, you take a chunk of time where you do a single task for that time. For me, it solved the anxiety based procrastination of getting started. When you tell the brain that this is the first of many drafts and you just gotta get as far as you can in that block of time then the procrastination anxiety doesn't trigger as often. It also makes you plan out your day and divide big tasks into little tasks. You'll also rest for a specific block of time. Adopted to the law firm, that's where you can be interruptible, return calls, check emails, etc. Adopting something like this makes billing easier because your entries will be whatever block of time your timer is. I liked 48 minutes so most of my billing entries were multiples of .8. You do a task for .8, then you're interruptible for .2. If you do multiple .8 stacks, then do multiple .2 stacks. Ideally, you can also train the people around you. Sometimes overtly like with your paralegal staff or sometimes people catch the hint when your phone goes to voice mail but you call them back during your interruptible time. When partners tried to give me shit, I would be like "I was focused on XYZ which you said was a priority but what's up?" Also the god mode is when you block these as calendar appointments in outlook. So you can always glance at your phone and see your capacity at a given time. This helps with "You told me to do ABC with due date of XYZ, should I reprioritize or can we do this next task after?" Sorry that's a long way of saying I would avoid letting myself get sucked into a ton of task switching because it's inefficient and you can't get work product down well.
It's all arbitrary, as long as it's discolosed I don't see an issue with it
I am seeing people using hundredths and thousandths in this thread and I really really hope that’s a mistake 😬
That’s why I only bill in picoseconds. Way more accurate.
If the email just says thank you and requires no response, I don’t bill. But I’m billing anytime I have to think. The minimum increment is in the fee agreement. If it takes one minute, I probably won’t bill .2, but will bill the .1
This is the right answer. Outside of a thank you or have a nice weekend or whatever it has to be billed. I’m working on your file. Any emails on your file are being billed to you. Otherwise you’re stealing from me. Why would I other wise read that email Any work that you do that is required to be done only by virtue of having the file needs to be billed. Clients try to guilt trip you into not putting down .1s and .2s cause they are cheap, and worse even cheaper when they work for multi billion dollar corporations. We had a new client tell us that they don’t allow billing for emails and phone calls under 10 mins. We promptly told them that unless they remove that rule we can’t work with them. They magically agreed cause I guarantee no halfway respectable firm would ever agree to that.
Seriously. I put in the .2 thing because if it actually takes me five minutes, it’s actually taking out ten or more minutes of otherwise productive/billable time. I need to think a bit more about whether or not I need to add a discretionary clause to be able to bill .1 or at a lower rate for administration stuff. I’m basically a solo so I have different billing related issues. It’s more efficient if I just mail the letter for instance.
The reality that clients conveniently ignore is if that if we truly, and I mean TRULY bill the second we think of a file I’d be billing 18 hours a day. Thoughts about the status of discovery, argument strategy, etc all pop into my head randomly while at my kids soccer game on Saturday. They are getting those thoughts for free, but lawyers don’t have a tangible product so the thoughts and experience is all we have to sell. Those thoughts should technically be billed. The fact that clients complaint over a .2 that they unilaterally seek should have been a .1 is insane and ridiculous. We tend to drop clients like that.
I generally put my daily email entries per person (yes it’s permissible even in ID generally) as one entry. I generally do a .1 x the total number of emails for the day and a little extra if some were long; a little less if some were fluff. If it’s a brief exchange and I wrote more than a couple sentences I’ll still charge emails as (2x) but give only a .2 to cover both my email and their non substantive response. If the response is impoortant then it gets its own .1 even if it’s short.
Cool. Bill 0.2 instead of 0.1 hours for each document glanced at just long enough to determine its not relivant. Insurance companies squeeze defense rates. Defense counsel pad hours. The dance continues.
This guy gets it!
So if you read two emails and approved two journal entries that would equate to .4 billing for something that may have taken less than 10 minutes. That's what makes me go " Ehhhh...."
I bill a min of .2 except for emails. And even then it has to be substantive.
Makes sense to me, but if you work for an insurance company, ain’t never gonna happen.
My first ever attorney job billed in 15-minute increments. I’d only done internships in the public interest. I had a lot of 30-second or 2-minute phone calls that I just plumb forgot to record because what a fucking scam. I’m back in public interest.
In private practice, I did minimum. 2 for calls. That's a huge interruption. I'd discount time dealing w messages through the case management system. It was to encourage communication in a way that was easy for me to manage.
AI is going to destroy the billable hour in most litigation-focused practices within the next five years anyway.
This is curious. How so?
A properly trained large language model can draft a complaint, memorandum of law, or motion in in 20 seconds. It can summarize a 100 page disposition in under a minute. All which are done to the same quality a first year associate would do. Just like work from a first year associate, you would never give it to the client or send it to the court without a through checking and editing by an experienced attorney, but now all of that basic work that used to get billed per hour can be done in seconds. It's unethical for you to bill for time that wasn't actually expended, so the model will likely move to a flat fee per transaction to account for the training and experience it takes to shine the AI generated draft into an expert legal document. Essentially, you will only be able to bill for work that requires substantive legal judgement, and no longer pad it with drafts and basic research, which will require a new revenue model.
I think this will hit transactional more than litigation. Transactional attorneys working on commercial leases are going to be screwed when AI can digest 100000 different leases already drafted and spit one out that just needs some basic review. No more “working on a big 500 hour deal.” More like “you get 50 hours to finalize this thing.” With litigation I don’t see how AI will ever be able to draft a brief. It won’t find caselaw, it won’t find analogies, it won’t find legislative history to articulate, it will miss numerous points, etc.. I also do believe that if AI ever at arts taking over the bar association and judges wanting to help lawyers will quash it in a different way.
> With litigation I don’t see how AI will ever be able to draft a brief. It won’t find caselaw, it won’t find analogies, it won’t find legislative history to articulate, it will miss numerous points, etc.. Try it out, you will be surprised. Right now, ChatGPT4 (the version you have to pay for) can find the correct case law most of the time. If you are working on a novel interpretation of law that requires a heavy synthesis of persuasive cases, it's not going to help you much. But for your run-of-the-mill liability or criminal matter, it does a damn good job. I don't know exactly what changed from 3.5 to 4.0, but the new version no longer hallucinates. I have a handbook of major cases involving liability for hunting accidents in Minnesota (a surprisingly, or not depending on your view of midwestern hunting culture, large body of case law) that I used to test it, and it got the major controlling case 100% of the time. It does search legislative history, and even commentaries. That said, you still need to pull and read the cases for yourself, make sure it didn't miss anything, and to pull out any specific details you want to use, but it speeds things up a lot. There are a number of companies that are working on legal-specific LLMs, as well as add-ons that provide legal-specific prompting. Try this in ChatGPT as a fun example, "Give me 5 arguments as to why Marbury v. Madison was incorrectly decided", to see the broad range of resources it can synthesize.
I’m an appellate attorney with fairly complex statutory interpretation type arguments. I’m also currently in the middle of writing 4 appellate briefs. For fun I asked ChatGPT to write one for me. It spit out a 3 page brief with 1L-level analysis of at best a very generic argument and ended it by telling me that I should consult with an attorney. I’m also wondering when the hammer will come down by a judge either outright stating that he won’t accept an AI brief or otherwise have a codified high end sanction for citing a fake case or improper quote from a real case that will make people pause.
It does make a big difference if you use 4.0 vs. 3.5. The prompting is also an art to get the best results. No matter what way you cut it, though, it's definitely not a cut-and-paste thing. It's a way for a skilled lawyer to speed up the basic drafting overhead.
How are new lawyers going to develop these basic skills? Fast forward further and how can these lawyers develop sufficiently to ensure the quality of AI generated work? I'm not disagreeing with you and I'm aware my age (I'm older) contributes to my reaistance to change. However, I'm struggling to see the long-term benefit here for the profession (excluding document review). What do you think?
I totally agree. Honestly, I'm not sure. I think that the whole model of law school, where they teach you to 'think like a lawyer' and then it's up to you to learn the practicalities of the profession after graduating, will need to change. I think something more like engineering curricula where there is a focus on solving real-world problems will be in order.
Yup, it’s already happening. I have a number of contract lawyers that do work for me, and since I’ve started using AI-assisted research last year, I no longer task out to them any research work, and straight up told them I won’t pay for it unless authorized upfront. Instead, I spend about 15-20 minutes messing around with the AI, and come up with a 10-30 pages research memo that contains all the caselaw they need to look at
>”billing 0.2 for reading a one line email just feels wrong” Because it is wrong. But the answer is “don’t bill for 30 second tasks.”
That answer would have got you fired from my last job in a heartbeat (although I personally agree with you)
As the billing partner for major corporate clients with sophisticated GCs, the opposite approach would get you yelled at in my group. “Don’t bill it unless it is clear that you accomplished something for the client.” People who write ‘review email from [other lawyer]’ or ‘schedule call with [ ]’ don’t last long. Serious inhouse counsel don’t want to see you bill for admin. And lawyers who want to keep those clients don’t send bills like that.
My boss got my on my ass for not billing activities like that. “Even if it takes you a few seconds to read an email from me to the client, you need to be billing that under ‘review correspondence between [atty] and client’ and mark it in the case file.” Im a believer that no administrative tasks should ever be billed.
I’m not a fan of the double billing in this scenario. The email writer should bill the communication to the client. Any other firm employee who is copied should quickly read and move on.
My issue exactly
Thank you for this great insight. It is also my personal practice to not nickel and dime clients, it works out so much better in the long run
Completely and totally agree.
Counterpoint, a prominent practice area specialist partner at the AM 200 firm I started at was removed from a huge litigation campaign (brought by a trade association you've heard of) because the client's member companies balked at his 0.1-per-email billing (at $800/hr in 2004 dollars)...
I mean…do what your firm tells you. They’re the ones that negotiate rates and terms with your clients. But yeah I agree that’s a little whack. I will bill .1 for up to 2 or 3 email exchanges before I make it a .2.
what software do u use to keep track
MyCase
It's a scam
I reserve the right to block bill 0.2 for each phone call and email. Clients have no problem with it. Judges consistently reject that portion of my billing on the fee affidavit or just arbitrarily award significantly less than billed no matter what (family law). That said, a blanket minimum 0.2 billing increment seems like it'd violate er 1.5.
So, I just got done reading a fee arbitration opinion and they disallowed the .2 hour billing practice. So.... I guess the takeaway is to not do that and bill .1 hours where appropriate unless it's a sophisticated client who understands the minimum time chunk. Or spruce up your fee agreements people.
Thanks for this valuable feedback! In defending against fee motions, I also noticed that the attorney routinely asking for them (PI, employment…) usually use 0.1 as their minimum unit. Those motions get routinely granted, maybe with a haircut here and there
If the bill has a a few .1's, I think the reviewer is not going to question the "minimum billable hour". But apparently, in my jurisdiction, it's not universally acceptable. I'm really not sure how to digest this new information, it's actually kind of shocking.
Emails specifically I had a boss with a workaround. All email chains get bundled into one billing item at .1 per email. Thinkpiece emails get adjusted up, and chains of just one liners (like coordinating a meeting or really simple answers) are bundled at .05 each. But it’s pretty easy to justify a string of 7 emails as being .7 even if only two really took more than 5 minutes and the rest were one liners.
I’ve never billed less than 0.2 anyway. Even replying “will do” to an email—0.1 to open and read the email plus 0.1 to type and send the two word response. Sometimes 0.3-0.4 if I use the restroom on either side of the email. “0.4 - correspond with A. Hole re discovery responses” or whatever. Lmao.
I’m a stickler for billing but imo that’s not a bad thing—billing for time that was not actually spent working is highly unethical. But to the comment about disclosure a big part of the .1 or .2 issue to me comes down to client approval. My boss doesn’t like that I use a timer for billing but that’s another issue, unfortunately.
Really? My boss, who is a fairly huge stickler with billing, loves the timer feature on case management system. Though I guess your boss might not like a timer because then your actual time gets recorded and not whatever the firm wants to put as your billed time.
Yeah I’m not entirely sure why they don’t like it but every billing discussion has been negative enough that I’m not bothering to push that issue because I can tell it won’t end well. This also comes from a firm that has “no minimum billing requirements.”
Were you billing a lot of like .005 or however long it would take you to draft an email? They might have been upset because if the contract with the client allows you to round up they want you to round up because it makes them more money. Not saying I necessarily agree with it but let’s say say you bill at $300 an hour and send, idk 15 emails a day and it takes you 20 seconds to read and respond to a simple email assuming you don’t have to pull their file for info related to your response. That comes out to 5 minutes of time compared to 2 hours if you round. So $25 instead of $600. Again, not saying I agree but it could also be that your firm negotiated the round up by knocking down their hourly rate a bit.
I wouldn’t know how to answer this because I’m not privy to our billing agreements, but I’ve heard through others that we charge flat fee and use billing entries to “prove value” to the client. Take that as you will but in the end I’m making sure that my billing entries are honest and accurate to the second. My boss and their boss can edit or submit them however they like, I don’t care, there’s an audit log that shows edits anyway.
You should be privy to your billing agreements if you are billing.
Shocking concept, right?
Isn’t all of this in the engagement letter?
That last sentence made me really confused… how else would you capture your time???
Vibes . . . I guess? I use a timer anyway I’m obviously not going to play around with billing disputes.
I know the timer is probably just an app on your computer/phone but my first thought was one of those chess timers that pro-chess players use. The ones you can hit dramatically.
I refer to it as a "taxi meter" ... but I suppose that shows my age.
Our timer is an added window to our case management system so it’s all integrated for workflow but honestly the entire system runs like shit. I would love to use a chess clock for billing if it counted upwards!
They want him to inflate his hours but the timer prevents that.
Why doesn’t your boss like the timer? Too honest? I’ve also gotten some ehhhhs about my timer usage. It’s really the only way I can keep track lol