Some mornings are just nice to wake up to. Confirmation of bias is an underappreciated source of joy. I relish any piece of information that reinforces my preconceptions. Four stories making the rounds have reminded me how right I am that:
- Price is what you pay. Value is what you get (hat tip to Warren Buffet).
- The billable hour model creates perverse incentives in aligning price and value.
- The problem with incentives is that they work even for lawyers.
- Despite their expertise, many lawyers spend their billable time on mind-numbing busywork, only some of which is actually necessary.
The most delicious story, of course, is the suit against DLA Piper for overbilling. The well-crafted emails produced by DLA include some choice quotes:
- "I hear we are already 200K over our estimate that’s Team DLA Piper!"
- "… now Vince has random people working full time on random research projects in standard ‘churn that bill, baby!’ mode. That bill shall know no limits."
- "DLA seems to love to low ball the bills and with the number of bodies being thrown at this thing, it’s going to stay stupidly high and with the absurd litigation POA has been in for years, it does have lots of wrinkles."
- "Didn’t you use 3 associates to prepare for a first day hearing where you filed 3 documents?"
- "And it took all of them 4 days to write those motions while I did cash collateral and talked to the client and learned the facts. Perhaps if we paid more money we’d have more skilled associates."
- "It’s a Thomson project, he goes full time on whatever debtor case he has running. Full time, 2 days a week."
