That'll Be $60 Per Email (or $7.50 per word) Please
There are some topics that I tend to stay away from, and improving the legal profession is one of them. I'm not really sure why. It's not that I don't believe that the legal profession needs improving. It surely does. For whatever reason, I'm content to suck up knowledge from elsewhere, maintain an open mind, try to implement improvements in my own way, and leave it at that. Maybe my thinking is that as far as blogging goes, I'll leave this topic to the people who obviously do a much better job of blogging about it.
However, I saw something recently that I couldn't let go by, and that's highlighted in this blog post (titled "How do Lawyers Even Get Away With This Stuff") at the "You're the Boss" blog (New York Times). The basic story is that a small business owner is moving and she enlists the help of a real estate firm to review her lease. She's told that it would cost roughly $2,500 dollars. She signs up, happily leaves everything to her lawyers, who appear to have treated the small business real estate lease documents as if they were the financing documents for the Trump Towers. They [over]lawyer it up and send her a few invoices which end up being well over the initial estimated $2,500.
This doesn't sit well with Ms. Walzer who calls and asks to speak about this bill. In the process of reviewing her bill, here's one thing that catches her eye:
This is a failure on many levels. Among other things, I'm not sure why it took the lawyer 0.2 hours to respond to the email, or why he even responded at all. But the bottom line is that clients don't like being billed for non-substantive email responses, or email responses in general. It's an embarrassment to the profession that someone even tried to justify this.
Ms. Walzer's post also reminded me of a post I read a ways back by Seattle investor Andy Sack. One month he received an invoice for a total of $35 for a phone call (and blogged about it).
Loosely related: post from William Carleton (post and comments are worth reading): "Picking a Law Firm: How Size Does and Doesn't Matter."
However, I saw something recently that I couldn't let go by, and that's highlighted in this blog post (titled "How do Lawyers Even Get Away With This Stuff") at the "You're the Boss" blog (New York Times). The basic story is that a small business owner is moving and she enlists the help of a real estate firm to review her lease. She's told that it would cost roughly $2,500 dollars. She signs up, happily leaves everything to her lawyers, who appear to have treated the small business real estate lease documents as if they were the financing documents for the Trump Towers. They [over]lawyer it up and send her a few invoices which end up being well over the initial estimated $2,500.
This doesn't sit well with Ms. Walzer who calls and asks to speak about this bill. In the process of reviewing her bill, here's one thing that catches her eye:
She raises the issue that she never requested a response and shouldn't be billed $60 for her lawyer letting her know that she should "take her time." Her lawyer strikes back, and says that the email pulled him away from the multimillion dollar transaction he'd been working on, and it was thus justified for them to bill the 0.2 hours at $300 per hour. (??)0.2 hours at $300 an hour ($60) for one lawyer’s reply to an e-mail I’d written letting him know that I was not going to be available and would review his comments when I was back in my office.
This is a failure on many levels. Among other things, I'm not sure why it took the lawyer 0.2 hours to respond to the email, or why he even responded at all. But the bottom line is that clients don't like being billed for non-substantive email responses, or email responses in general. It's an embarrassment to the profession that someone even tried to justify this.
Ms. Walzer's post also reminded me of a post I read a ways back by Seattle investor Andy Sack. One month he received an invoice for a total of $35 for a phone call (and blogged about it).
Loosely related: post from William Carleton (post and comments are worth reading): "Picking a Law Firm: How Size Does and Doesn't Matter."
Venkat, thanks for the link back to the post and comments on my blog (you got the ball rolling on that great series of comments). An observation on the response of the lawyer to the client who complained about the charge for the email: seems like he was also saying or at least implying that he found her deal to be an annoyance, not worthy of his time.
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