For years—decades, even—there’s been a lot of talk in the legal press and at conferences about alternative fee arrangements. And yet the billable hour has persisted. Now that legal departments have access to more technology and data than ever before, could 2017 be the year AFAs finally become the new standard? Some industry experts think so.
While general counsel have been touting AFAs for ages, many legal departments weren’t equipped to embrace them until more recently, says Stasia Kelly, the former general counsel of American International Group Inc. and now DLA Piper’s co-managing partner for the Americas. “We couldn’t have done this 20 years ago,” says Kelly, who co-chaired an American Bar Association report on alternative billing in 2001. “We didn’t have the technology and we didn’t have the analytical tools to do this kind of work.”
