As this year comes to a close, law firm leaders will prognosticate about what trends will affect their bottom lines in 2015. Accordingly, this is the perfect time to do a little prognosticating of my own, and to present five predictions of trends that will affect litigation firms in 2015.
The billable hour will die
OK, I’m not crazy enough to predict that the billable hour will actually die off in 2015 (or ever), nor am I going to bet that the six-minute time increment it is built upon will ever go away. It will likely live on in perpetuity to varying degrees. However, as we approach the latter part of this decade, starting in 2015, we will begin to see the erosion of the widely used time billing tool. More specifically, the tasks that make up most of the “0.1s” entered onto a time sheet will begin to be eliminated from billable time and moved into the dreaded unreimbursable “overhead” category.
