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Comment by lr | Hacker News Reader

All of these are great to watch out for. However, the "Value Billing" one seems a little like, oh, let's see... Software! Programmers do value billing all the time. We write one piece of software and charge n number of customers for it. So, if programmers can do it, so can lawyers.

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If you've been contracting with customers to provide them your time as a programmer and charging them in this way, your customers need to sue you. Legal services are not a packaged product, they are time, and that time is what is being paid for.

This comment really illustrates the major flaw in hourly billing. People begin to believe that all they are paying for is time. But they really are not just paying for time. They are paying for an attorney's expertise in getting the job done. This is why I try to stay away from hourly billing as much as possible. The billable hour is a scourge to the profession imho.

They are paying for time. The time of the attorney being engaged. Time from an attorney with significant expertise will, of course, cost more than time from someone who just passed the bar.

If you want to bill on some other basis, fine, but you are not entitled to tell your clients you're billing them an hourly rate and then make up the hours based on the value you think is being provided. That's fraud.

I agree with you. My point was just that I do not want my value being reduced to nothing but time, and that is exactly what hourly billing does. So I tend not to do use hourly billing. Having done it working for other attorneys, I'll tell you it is a crappy way to spend your day keeping track of minutes.

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