Comment by speedplane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by speedplane | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> this doesn't seem like a strong argument because this is just basic market competition. Even though a law firm being more efficient would lose hourly billing they would quickly grow more clients by providing a cheaper service. The lawfirm itself has no particular incentive to operate inefficiently.

As a factual matter, you are quite wrong. Law firms rarely get reprimanded for over-billing, and in fact, the opposite can be true.

When a lawyer bills 2X more than a competitor, they can say that they just did a 2X better job, were more thorough, etc. Lawsuits are rarely repetitive, as the facts and legal principles applied vary widely, so it's very difficult to determine what's the correct amount of time to spend on something. Worse, firms that develop reputations for big bills, can even attract big bet-the-company cases where clients can justify paying top-dollar.

The economic principal behind this is that legal services are not a typical "commodity", so standard market principles are not as effective. If you can turn a legal service into a commodity (such as LegalZoom has some parts of the law), you can be much more effective.

Can they not be more efficient and still bill the same hours? What is stopping them from improving their internal efficiency but still pocketing the same amount of money?

> Can they not be more efficient and still bill the same hours? What is stopping them from improving their internal efficiency but still pocketing the same amount of money?

Generally, if you want to sell technology to lawyers, telling them they will be more efficient will not work, they are simply not motivated to spend money for something makes something they are already doing take less time.

If you want to sell to lawyers, the best arguments you have are:

- Increase Quality / Reduce Errors: There are tons of mistakes that lawyers can make, and they are constantly terrified of making them. As a lawyer reputation is everything, and even silly inconsequential mistakes hurt.

- Get More Clients: Small-time lawyers spend up to 50% of their time trying to attract clients. At larger firms, it's less than that, but it's still a constant pressure that they are judged on. They may not be willing to pay for something that makes their work 10% faster, but they will pay for something that gets them 10% more clients.

- Capabilities That Change the Law Itself: Some technology really changes the rules itself. E-discovery allowed firms to look through millions of pages of documents, and to bury their opponents in the same. If you didn't have it, you were at a disadvantage and would lose your case.

As a counterpoint, I’d like to state that being able to raise efficiency when you need it could be a huge selling point.

On slow days, I don’t want to raise my efficiency that much , I take my time and review more thorougly. But on busy days, where I bill 13+ billable hours for a week, I’d want as much efficiency as possible.

> As a counterpoint, I’d like to state that being able to raise efficiency when you need it could be a huge selling point. On slow days, I don’t want to raise my efficiency that much , I take my time and review more thorougly.

I don't think you're really talking about "efficiency" here. On slow days, you may want to spend more time to do a more thorough job, but you still wouldn't want to be less efficient.

Simple automation example: renaming files into a new format. If there was a tool that could rename a large number of files for you quickly, you would use it on slow days and busy days. There is nothing to be gained to doing it manually.

I think you're referring to tools that speed you up but sacrifice quality. That isn't a pure efficiency tool, it's tool that allows you to adjust balance your time and quality of work.

> Can they not be more efficient and still bill the same hours? What is stopping them from improving their internal efficiency but still pocketing the same amount of money?

As a lawyer, if you read and understand a document in 10 minutes and bill an hour of time for it, that's lying and you can lose your bar license over it. However, if you read that same document very slowly and carefully over a full hour, then you are considered a high quality detail-oriented attorney.

You definitely can, most of the times you can’t collect all the hours you put in. Client pays what it pays and the rest is written off. It’s the senior’s job to manage the ratio of billed hours to collected hours.

If you can and want to bill more to a client, you simply review the matter covering more depth or let the work be done by more senior lawyers who have a better hourly rate.

Big-law collects all the client is ready to spend on legal services. The more you spend, the better service you’ll get. If you suspect foulplay in billables, review the job narratives and raise a complaint.

> You definitely can, most of the times you can’t collect all the hours you put in. Client pays what it pays and the rest is written off. It’s the senior’s job to manage the ratio of billed hours to collected hours.

I am telling you --from experience, not theory-- that many lawyers are resistant to time-saving tools. Not all of them, but many of them. They rarely voice out-loud that their concern is about reduced billables, and will instead make absurd arguments that the time-saving tools decrease quality.

Simple real life example: we were selling a very simple bulk download tool to a law firm. Instead of clicking a link and downloading a document many times, this tool would download many in batch and put them in a zip folder. They raised the objection saying "how do we know it downloaded everything", even though the zip file also had an excel listing all the documents that were downloaded, the source of where they came from, and any errors in downloading them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com