No First Year Billabe Hours? An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Someday, first-year associates who can command salaries of $160K a year, will get hip to the jive and negotiate the deal now being offered (as far as we know) only by Atlanta-based Ford & Harrison -- real world training without billing requirements for their first year of practice.
Listen up young lawyers! These firms are willing to pay you close to $200K/year to land your talent. You have negotiating power. Go for it.
The Ford & Harrison initiative, however, stops just short of perfection, suggesting that some first-year hours might be billed to the client. I say, throw it all out! Teach these youngsters how to draft a motion, take a deposition, even try a case during their first year without billing any of their time (law firms will find a way to make up for the loss in first year billables, I'm certain of it).
This is what clients are demanding (see the ABA Law Journal article on the new On-Ramp Program, which I'll find & link to as soon as the sun hides behind a cloud on this picture-perfect Hawaiian beach day again). For excerpt, see the extended entry here.
Way to go F&H!! You'll have the happiest and best-trained second year associates in the entire world! Excerpt and link below.
Firm Kills Billable Hour for First-Year Associates from the National Law Journal
The billable hour: demanding, disparaged and now dead -- at least at one Atlanta-based law firm.
Ford & Harrison, a 190-attorney labor and employment firm, has tossed out billable-hour requirements for first-year associates. The program aims to close the practical-skills gap of law school education and increase value to clients. The firm also hopes it will enable associates to handle meatier matters more quickly.
Overall, Ford & Harrison's leaders expect the new program to help retain beginning lawyers and appease clients.
"Everyone sits around and complains about the problems," said C. Lash Harrison, managing partner of the law firm. "I figured, what the heck, maybe we can try something."
The idea is for associates to spend their time observing depositions and witness interviews and attending hearings and litigation strategy meetings. While the firm has no specific expectations of associates meeting the 1,900 billable hours it previously required from new attorneys, it does anticipate that some of the work they undertake during their first 15 or so months will be valuable enough to bill.
Laurie Hartman, assistant dean for the Office of Career Services at Emory University School of Law, said that she was not aware of any other sizeable law firms that had completely done away with billables for new associates.
"It's a great idea," she said, adding that the program would help students to differentiate Ford & Harrison from other law firms.
Web Extra: Who's Using Legal OnRamp
If Cisco Systems general counsel Mark Chandler is right, the information superhighway will be littered with law firms like so much road kill.
And if his new initiative succeeds in bringing together in-house legal departments and like-minded law firms that can think outside the clock, a safe route for those lawyers who get it already is being paved.
While law firms have become more like businesses over the past generation, they still lag far behind the business world in controls for value and efficiency—not to mention real-world forces governing profitability. Assigning associates to reinvent the wheel of established law over and over again (and billing for their hours) has pushed profits and revenues per partner ever higher.
However, something else might have been pushed too far. In-house legal departments are going beyond collective grousing at association meetings and joining in efforts seeking to bring change to reluctant—by business standards, fat and happy—service providers.
Chandler’s new baby, the LegalOnramp, is one example of those change efforts. It is a members-only online community of corporations’ in-house legal staffs and outside law firms. Everything about LegalOnramp is geared to information sharing, collaboration and (its main reason for being) negotiating honest value for legal work.
In place of surfing from one law-firm Web site to another in search of legal updates, FAQs, forms, templates and the like, LegalOnramp offers all that and more in a single, limited-access site. Added to that mix are:
The entire knowledge-management databases of individual member firms.
Wiki collaboration on legal knowledge and strategies.
A version of the Facebook social-network site for greater community.
A developing, “craigslist” way of pitching and getting business that avoids the troublesome features of requests for proposals.
LegalOnramp won’t be formally announced till later this year, if at all, says Paul Lippe, a lawyer with expertise in Web technologies who Chandler tapped to build it. But after 15 corporations came together in its legal services network last March along with about 25 law firms, the program started growing quickly. By early June, the tally was 30 companies and more than 100 law firms.
For remainder of article click here.
