In an opinion piece in the current issue of Forbes magazine, Evan Chesler, the presiding partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore calls for the end of the billable hour. “The billable hour makes no sense, not even for lawyers,” Chesler, a prominent litigator, writes: “If you are successful and win a case early on, you put yourself out of work. If you get bogged down in a land war in Asia, you make more money. That is frankly nuts.”
In his Forbes piece, Chesler analogized lawyers to building contractors. He wrote that when he hired Joe, the contractor, to renovate his kitchen (Joe, the plumber, evidently was booked on a cable television show), he and Joe decided on what the job was worth and agreed on a price. When Joe finished the work three weeks ahead of schedule, Chesler paid him a bonus.
