Lawyers, Process Management and the Billable Hour's Demise

There is a good piece today in Law.com about how law firms are looking more seriously at process management in order to reign in legal costs. It's all tied into the backlash against the billable hour, a trend that has been growing since the start of the Great Recession. The author writes:

Project and process management -- in essence the antithesis of the billable-hour model -- is a concept being eyed by law firms as they try to ensure they can deliver the efficiency required to make good on their alternative fee arrangements.

I wrote about this in another blog that I was writing for a client (suggesting that lawyers only have to look at how contractors charge for their work in order to figure out how to do the same in the practice of law).

What this all means is that the days of running the clock are over for attorneys. Like contractors, lawyers need to figure out how to apply the "right" resources to get different parts of the job done. Tasking a first year associate with document review and charging the client $300 per hour will be a thing of the past within a few years. Once lawyers are working for a fixed fee, the right incentives will be there to become more efficient (or process oriented).

The career implications are obvious to me. If you haven't already started investigating ways to price legal work on a project basis, the time has come; and if you have never thought about how to break your work into pieces so that some aspects of the work can be done by cheaper vendors, then start doing this and you will find very receptive clients.

A True Electronic Future for the Practice of Law

I've bought real estate, sold real estate and refinanced many times. Each time I complete a transaction, I think to myself, there has got to be a better way to do this. So much energy is wasted on producing paper documents and going through a huge stack of them and signing them one at a time. But maybe some truly entrepreneurial lawyers are finally getting it right.

While we are far from creating a paperless law office, has the time for true electronic transactions finally arrived?

The marketplace is screaming for more efficiency and lower legal fees. There is a lot of opportunity here for tech savvy lawyers in all practice areas who can find ways to do it better, faster and cheaper.

So what have you done lately to add efficiency to your practice?

Of course this is all tied into how lawyers charge for legal services and until lawyers more fully embrace alternatives to the billable hour, the motivation remains high to continue being inefficient.

Think Like a Lawyer-Bill Like a Contractor

My latest post on alternative billing and how lawyers can overcome their aversion to ditching the billable hour.