Discover Sample Attorney Billing Descriptions for R&D

Sample attorney billing descriptions for R&D

the title of this video is understanding attorney billing why the law offices of john a belcher does not work hourly but instead works on contingency a company called uh cleo which provides management services for lawyers where they track everything that the lawyers do in exchange for a fee did an analysis of how much time lawyers in the united states and canada spent work working on client matters in a day and ing to cleo lawyers only spent 29 of their time actually performing client services which was dwarfed by other percentages 33 on generating more business and this was based on data from 60 000 paying clio users so the question arises if attorneys are only working 29 of their time in a given day for the clients what happens on the timesheets well in fact law firms typically have a minimal amount of billable time of time that is charged to the client which can be 40 hours a week which is a 2 000 uh or more so what about this discrepancy between the amount of time that's actually spent and the amount that's sent to the client well the aba did a study in 2002 and they created a commission on billable hours and they were very concerned about the corrosive impact that hourly billing had on the profession and and here is what the aba you know blue ribbon commission found fault with in hourly billing first it penalizes the efficient and productive lawyer imagine a big firm and you have two associates one of them bills the client 250 000 and delivers 10 000 to the client the other one bills the client 10 000 and delivers 250 000 to the client who gets promoted it's the one that brings in the most money to the firm hourly billing ing to commission fails to discourage excessive layering and duplication of effort the more people you have on the case the more meetings you have the more you make it puts the client's interest in conflict with the lawyers the client wants to get the maximum amount as quickly as possible and the lawyers are driving the fee train and finally the commission on billable hours noted that the client runs the risk of paying for padding of time sheets because there's this big motivation to get paid and in fact the commission also noted that the padding of the timesheets was really just the beginning that once the attorneys were dishonest and creating fictional timesheets that it let an ongoing pattern of deception come into the billing so what is an alternative we are a plaintiff's firm and we do not bill hourly and there's a reason for that for all of the reasons that we've just discussed and fundamentally you want to be on the same side as the client you want to have a case that you believe in and you want to have the motivation to get the case settled as quickly and promptly as possible what happens when you go to an hourly firm with a plaintiff's attorney as a plaintiff attorney they're going to tell you you have a great case 100 of the time on a plaintiff's case you want to consider a contingency attorney and you want to know the reality of how lawyer billing actually goes down