The problem with the billable hour, Part 1.

In this article, Patrick J. Schiltz, a Notre Dame law professor, discusses the collision of money and ethics in traditional law firm practice. Arguing that the culture of the law firm -- with its focus on billable time -- induces many young lawyers to regularly "steal" from their clients:

For the typical young attorney, acting unethically starts with his timesheets. One day, not too long after he starts practicing law, he will sit down at the end of a long, tiring day and he just won't have much to show for his efforts in terms of billable hours. It will be near the end of the month. He will know that all of the partners will be looking at his monthly time report in a few days, so what he'll do is pad his timesheet just a bit. Maybe he'll bill a client for 90 minutes for a task that really took him only 60 minutes to perform. He will, however, repeatedly promise himself that he will repay the client at the first opportunity by doing 30 minutes of work for the client for "free." In this way, he'll be "borrowing," not "stealing."

Then what will happen is that it will become easier for the young lawyer to take these little loans against future work. And after a while, he will stop paying back these little loans. He will convince himself that, although he billed for 90 minutes and spent only 60 minutes on the project, he did such good work that his client should pay a bit more for it. After all, his billing rate is awfully low, and his client is awfully rich.

And then he will pad more and more. Every two-minute telephone conversation will go down on his timesheet as 10 minutes, every three-hour research project will go down with an extra quarter-hour or so. He will continue to rationalize his dishonesty to himself in various ways until one day he stops doing even that. And, before long � it won't take him much more than three or four years � he will be stealing from his clients almost every day, and he won't even notice it.

As a solo lawyer, I don't have the pressure to bill a certain number of hours to please my superiors and pay for their BMW's. My problem with relying upon the billable hour isn't that I steal from my clients, it is that I steal from myself. I consistently fail to record all my time, and have yet to find a method that allows me to capture it all. It is not the big projects that escape me, but rather the 5 -10 minute projects, letters, and phone calls that happen throughout the day. I have had many 10 hour days with six or fewer hours of billable time. I also feel guilty sometimes about the time it takes me to do something -- thinking that I've taken too long to complete a project -- and I adjust my bill accordingly. Ditching the billable hour entirely gets me away from these problems and moves my practice toward a more fulfilling method of earning a living.