The Giants’ approach will sound familiar to anyone who grew up, as I did, in the era of “cheap night” at the movies, wherein ticket prices for Tuesday night showings were less than half those of other nights. The theaters, normally all but deserted on Tuesdays, were instead always full. Given that cinema owners make most of their money off concession sales, I imagine that “cheap Tuesdays” were immensely profitable. But as Malcolm Gladwell observed in The Tipping Point, theaters could actually go farther and change the price of individual movies according to their popularity, much as the Giants are doing with their game tickets: charge more for The King’s Speech and less (much less) for Yogi Bear.

There’s a reason why price tags are printed on cheap stickers, easily applied and frequently changed. Price is not carved in stone; it’s elastic, a function of supply and demand. This is true even in the law: it’s the rare lawyer who has never offered a discount on his or her hourly rate to win a client engagement. But rate discounts are about as radical as law firms have ever gotten with price. For most lawyers, fixing a price in advance of providing the service is anathema, and adjusting that fixed price according to a set of evolving criteria is farther beyond the pale again. But I think that’s about to change.

What got me thinking in this direction were reports this week that henceforth, DLA Piper (the newest holder of the “world’s biggest firm” title) was instituting minimum purchase levels for its clients. DLA’s US offices are said to be mandating an entry-level threshold of $200,000 a year for all new clients, while DLA International will set the amounts at €25,000 for new clients that don’t pose a potential conflict and €100,000 for those that do. The reasons, as explained in an excellent post by Financial Times GC Tim Bratton, are interesting: the firm wants lawyers to consider the firm’s strategic priorities more than their own; it wants to reduce the size of “conflict shadows” cast by smaller clients; and it wants to reduce the administrative cost of dealing with so many matters. Essentially, the firm wants many fewer, and much bigger, clients.

Some of my friends in the blawgosphere have called this a “cover charge,” but I don’t think that’s exactly the right analogy. A cover charge is an amount everyone pays at the entrance to ensure that no matter how little you spend upon entering, the proprietor will still turn a profit. DLA Piper, by contrast, is hiring a large, heavily muscled man to stand at the front door and admit only those customers who are guaranteed to spend enough to produce a profit. They’re pre-screening their clients for wealth, much as a legal aid clinic pre-screens its clients for poverty.

It might not win any points for populism, and there are serious implications for current and future partners. But as a strategic execution, as a profitability measure, and as a clear marketplace signal about which clients it desires, it’s brilliant: as Ron Friedmann notes, “it’s about making a conscious decision about your business, your costs, and your market position,” something few firms do. And in its own way, it’s an example of pricing innovation that other firms should follow.

I’ve written before about how the maxim “Don’t compete on price” has limited value in a highly competitive, price-sensitive market. Law didn’t use to be one of those markets; it is now, and some degree of price competition is becoming inevitable. But “competing on price” doesn’t have to mean getting involved in a downward-spiraling price war. As DLA Piper has demonstrated, you can compete on price upwards, setting floors rather than ceilings on how much you charge. For that matter, you can compete on price sideways, diagonally, and inside out through the fourth dimension if you like. You can make price a market differentiator simply by being creative and gutsy.

Examples are already abounding. Carolyn Elefant suggests that DLA Piper might effectively “offer $300,000 worth of service to clients who are willing to lock in and pre-pay the $200,000 minimum. Between the cash-flow benefit of receiving $200,000 up front and use of offshoring or second-tier contract lawyers in house, DLA Piper could still earn a decent profit, even while providing a ‘volume discount.” John Wallbillich at The Wired GC goes further: “What about a firm that does $1 million plus for a client not charging for telephone consultations with a defined number of client in-house counsel? Or provide access to part of a firm’s form files or knowledge management repository? How about a 3+ year associate on-site, gratis, for clients spending more than $5 million?”

Here are some more possibilities that law firms should mull over.

1. Charge like an airline. Some client matters are utterly routine, some are high priority, and some are absolutely urgent; but most lawyers tend to price solutions to each type of matter the same. Airlines thrive, even in a cutthroat marketplace, by charging you more for a ticket tomorrow than for one in three weeks’ time. What’s to stop a law firm from saying to client with an urgent problem: “To get this done tomorrow, we’ll need to drop everything else we’re doing and work on it for the next 24 hours; that’s a lost opportunity cost for us that will be reflected in a higher price.” Or conversely: “This is a low priority for you and can be done at a fairly leisurely pace by us; we’ll chop 30% off our regular price to reflect those facts.” Clients might not like the former treatment, but they’d understand it and probably accept it; they would love, and remember, the latter treatment.

2. Charge like a cellphone company. A dangerous comparison, to be sure, since many cellphone contracts epitomize the concept of gouging. But I mean this in the sense that many companies will discount the price of a cellphone itself, all the way up to 100%, if you subscribe to the connection service and payment plan. What would a law firm give a client for free in return for the guarantee of a fixed (and pre-paid) monthly fee over a two-year period? Maybe ten hours a month of a designated senior associate or junior partner’s time, no bills, no disbursements; maybe access to multi-jurisdictional regulatory compliance status updates; maybe an emergency “hot line” number that would put the client directly in touch with a responsible firm representative 24 hours a day. It would essentially be the freemium model applied to law.

3. Charge like a partner in a relationship. Seth Godin points out the cognitive dissonance by which many companies give their best rates to their worst customers: the difficult, the demanding, the frequent switchers. Similarly, their most loyal and enthusiastic customers are taken for granted and are charged accordingly. My Edge colleague Ed Wesemann has noted the same problem in law firms: discounts are offered to entice new business, but if the one-time client comes aboard and stays aboard, its rates soon go up and it’s relegated to the same “standard” treatment as the firm’s other “best” clients. Reward your best clients, give them discounts and freebies without being asked, simply to say thank you for being your relationship partner. As Seth puts it: make your best customers into your best marketers.

Lawyers resist change in many aspects of their work, but most of all in pricing: they try to pass all the risk of price miscalculation onto the client, a goal that the billable-hour system fulfills perfectly. Mature markets, however, allow (if not demand) more sophisticated pricing in which both the buyer and the seller accept some risk as a justifiable sacrifice to the greater goal of a stable, mutually beneficial relationship. DLA Piper is taking a risk with this new client minimum scheme, because it has both upside and downside: good for them, no matter how it works out.

Price is a conversation, not a command; it’s a journey rather than a destination. Lawyers with the wisdom to recognize that, and the courage to be flexible and creative in response, will emerge the winners from the new price wars that look poised to begin.

Okay, strictly speaking, it’s a report rather than a book. But I’m so interested in talking about this publication and its importance to the developing field of alternative fee arrangements (AFAs, a topic we’re focused on these days at Edge) that I’m willing to blur genres — and in any event, at 150 pages, it’s not like this is a pamphlet. The LegalBizDev Survey of Alternative Fees is written by consultant Jim Hassett, Ph.D., and is based on interviews with managing partners, senior lawyers and AFA managers at 37 of the largest 100 law firms in the United States. To a critic who objected that a self-selected 37% isn’t a statistically sound sample, Jim replied that while his results may not be scientifically “good,” they’re the best available resource on the subject. That is unquestionably true — but this report is also good, and is worth your time.

The Survey takes an start-to-finish look at AFAs: how they’re defined, how they developed, what drives clients to push for them, bidding strategies for lawyers who want to use them, nine common examples of AFAs, recommendations to both lawyers and clients for maximizing their effectiveness, and what the future holds. Although the author delivers content throughout, especially at the start and finish, the bulk of the Survey is drawn from the respondents themselves, in their own words. That last point is not insignificant: because Jim guaranteed anonymity to his interviewees (the 37 firms are named, but no comment is matched with a firm and all comments are anonymous), he received some wonderfully blunt opinions. Here’s one of my favourites, a quote from a law firm chairman that would never be made for attribution:

“I think it hurts lawyers’ egos to suggest that all of the work that they do is not brain surgery. And when you suggest that they might be able to get away with using people who are not junior brain surgeons, almost everyone will say, ‘Oh, no, no, no. To do my stuff, you really need to be a brain surgeon like me.’ And it’s just ridiculous. I think that there’s an odd and irrational pride in wasting money. It’s gratifying for people to brag to their friends about how much they have to pay summer associates, and how much they pay starting associates, like, ‘Isn’t this a crime? We’re paying young associates more than judges, but hey, they’re brilliant. And they work for me.’ It’s an odd situation. But I think we’ve been able to do that because the market has paid to deal with it. And that may all be over.”

This candour (which, by the way, speaks highly of the trust these lawyers place in Jim Hassett) pays great dividends in the form of unalloyed honesty from these law firm leaders, allowing us to see how they approach AFAs, what systems they set up to deal with them, and the successes (and sometimes failures) that resulted. It’s a pretty safe bet that these folks didn’t share everything they knew on the subject, and at least some of their reports and comments must have been a little self-serving or trumped up. But even if you apply that discount, the insights here are remarkable. I don’t want you to forgo the chance to read them all for yourselves, so here are two good ones:

“In the past, where we have proposed unilaterally various fixed-fee arrangements, the clients have turned them down, because they think that if we proposed them, there must be something wrong with them. We have proposed ten alternative fee arrangements for every one that is accepted. Maybe in-house counsel are afraid that outside counsel will sandbag them by building inefficiencies and excess margins into the fixed-fee quotes. … The larger problem with RFPs and alternative fees in general is really the trust issue.”

“One of our problems is that our partners seem to think they have a better product than the people we’re competing with. And so when the client compares our fixed fee with other firms’, they ask how come we can’t do the work for less. [The partners typically reply that competitors are] not offering the same product that we are, so I ask [the partners], ‘Why are we offering a product that the client won’t pay for?’ It’s a whole mindset that will require a long time to change.”

Much of the value in the Survey is derived from these first-person accounts, but Jim also does a service by rounding up, explaining and giving examples of nine common types of AFAs, along with their pros and cons, from fee caps (“the dumbest deal ever,” according to one law firm respondent) all the way up to portfolio fixed fees, limited contingencies, and holdback arrangements. And his recommendations for success in alternative fee arrangements — both to firms and to clients — are especially valuable. I won’t list them all, but it’s noteworthy that his dual sets of recommendations have two in common for lawyers and clients: improve management and focus on value.

Two things struck me when reading through this report. The first is the perhaps surprisingly high level of savvy displayed by these interviewees: contrary to the popular impression of large law firms in general when it comes to AFAs (an impression often reflected in this blog’s entries, it must be said), there are dozens of smart, informed and motivated lawyers in leadership positions within the AmLaw 100 who not only get the need for AFAs, but who are assessing the challenges, exploring options, and developing systems to implement them. If I were running a large law firm that competes with some of these firms, and I hadn’t done any serious work on AFAs within my organization, this Survey would make a chilling read. Most encouraging is the fact that these lawyers have identified the fundamental stumbling blocks to AFA implementation — cultural, financial, infrastructural — and are doing what they can to address them. That recognition doesn’t make these obstacles any less daunting, though.

The other thing that emerges from this Survey is that large corporate clients aren’t doing nearly enough to promote AFA relationships with their outside counsel. The number of times private-practice lawyers express frustration with in-house departments’ reluctance or intransigence to engage in serious AFA discussions is noteworthy: all too often, law firm AFA proposals to corporate counsel are greeted with polite statements of preference for a discount on hourly rates. Nor are corporate departments any better equipped to project-manage or otherwise administer an AFA system than their outside counterparts: more than one respondent cited the difficulty of trying to tell a general counsel that the lawyers in her department are as much the problem as the solution.

Overall, this is a powerful and important contribution to our collective understanding of alternative fee arrangements in law, a subject that Jim notes really is still in its infancy. For all that, the picture does feel incomplete: all the contributions and opinions come from law firms, and the absence of the in-house lawyer perspective leaves you wondering if general counsel might have a different view of the “reluctance and intransigence” problem about which their outside counsel complain. Perhaps a follow-up survey could speak with GCs of Fortune 500 companies, or be coordinated with the Association of Corporate Counsel as part of its Value Challenge, in order to provide another perspective, or perhaps be merged with the law firm survey to give a holistic view of this evolving area.

But on its own terms, The LegalBizDev Survey of Alternative Fees is a significant and very useful guide to understanding not just what AFAs are and how they work, but also the ongoing challenges and roadblocks to their implementation. Every law firm that seriously intends to tackle alternative fee arrangements would clearly benefit from reviewing this work.

Lawyers are going nowhere in this new marketplace unless they can lose this obsession with the effort-based valuation of work. At the heart of lawyers’ billable-hour infatuation, even beyond the attraction of low-risk pricing and the enablement of perfectionism, lies the basic belief that the harder you work, the more you should get paid. “It took me ten hours to do this, so I should be paid twice what another task took five hours to do.” The nature of the work, its relative simplicity or complexity, the knowledge resources it did or didn’t require, and the value or relative lack thereof to the client — all these variables are considered incidental to the effort exerted, the expenditure of the lawyer’s precious time, to accomplish the work.

Very few marketplaces, however, base price directly on effort and time.  Avatar cost 20 times what The Hurt Locker cost to make and took years longer to complete, yet my ticket to watch either Oscar contender costs the same. One real estate agent might make ten times more effort at finding the right buyers for a home than another, yet they both get the same commission upon sale. I can go to a global craft show and buy a beautiful hand-made shawl that an aged, arthritic, Guatemalan woman spent a painful three days to create for less than a family dinner at the local pizza joint will cost that same night. Price differences can emerge from expertise, or from quality, or from brand assurance, or from customer value — but they don’t emerge from how hard someone had to work to make something.

Clients truly don’t care what it costs lawyers, in time and effort, to do their jobs. All they care about is the price, and the aptness of any price is ultimately judged by the purchaser against the value that the purchase delivers. Price is what the buyer will pay; cost is the resource drain on the seller to make the product or service. Lawyers conflate the two and base their price on their costs in time and effort. Clients are saying: your time and your effort are not relevant to the value of your service to me. What the current unprecedented drive towards fixed fees for legal work really signifies is a marketplace slowly but steadily shifting from supplier-based pricing to customer-based pricing.

Lawyers are having a very difficult time with this, for three reasons. One, as stated, is the realization that their time and effort has little market value. A second is the subsequent realization that they now need to understand and control their own internal costs to a degree never before required, and at many law firms, that’s a nightmare scenario. But the third reason is likely the hardest of all to accept, a traumatizing underlying premise to the whole conversation: the value of lawyers’ work isn’t really for lawyers to decide. Ultimately, the price of a lawyer’s services is not something a lawyer can control — and loss of control is not something most lawyers can abide.

A lawyer without a client or a file has no marketplace value — that value exists only once the lawyer is engaged on a task brought forward by the client, delivered to the client and paid for by the client. Given that fact, it’s neither surprising nor unnatural that price should be determined by the client as well. A lawyer can exert a great deal of influence on her price if she possesses extraordinary skills or experiences, and perhaps if her talents are so scarce and in great demand, she really can name her price. But 98% of lawyers are not in this position. And the days when they can dictate their price unilaterally, and base that price on their level of exertion, are ending.

That’s why the legal profession is struggling — it’s trying to come to grips with an entirely new pricing paradigm. It’s going to take a long time, and many lawyers won’t grasp the reality of the new environment until it’s too late. The longer a lawyer holds on to the idea that time and effort translates into value in the legal marketplace, the greater the chances that he or she will be one of them.

* Orrick will handle all of Levi Strauss’ legal work worldwide for a fixed annual fee, according to The Recorder. Levi Strauss will keep only one other firm to continue its brand protection work. Where Orrick doesn’t have an office, the law firm itself will retain and pay outside counsel.

* United Technologies not only requires fixed-fee arrangements with its law firms — it also wants the firm to show exactly how it arrived at the fixed fee in question and how it intends to make money off it, Corporate Counsel magazine says.

* Cisco Systems now buys all its legal work through AFAs, again from Corporate Counsel. Routine matters are bundled together and firms are invited to bid for the work on a flat-fee basis. For more complex or protracted files, Cisco pays a flat monthly fee and a bonus for a good result.

* DLA Piper won a tender process to handle most of Kraft’s legal work, aside from major M&A deals, LegalWeek reported. While the article doesn’t mention fixed fees per se, the DLA lawyer quoted in the piece uses phrases like “controlling costs” and “operational efficiencies.”

How are lawyers responding to all this? Generally speaking, not well. Many continue to believe this is a temporary phenomenon, not a complete re-ordering of the pricing of their services. Some are panicking: Jim Haslett reports that some law firms are engaging in de facto price wars, offering flat fees well below normal with no clear plan how they can deliver at that price. And even well-meaning, sensible lawyers are now tying themselves up in knots over how they should charge for their services: fixed fee? Discounted billable hour? Blended rate? Success fees? What’s clear is that to an unprecedented degree, the legal profession is finally ready and willing to have a serious discussion about billing methods. Which is kind of too bad, because the whole discussion is, to a great degree, now irrelevant.

There’s really not much to be gained anymore by debating the billable hour versus the fixed fee, or even by talking that much about the methods by which legal services are bought and sold. We’re paying too much attention to billing, when we need to be paying attention to how we operate law firms.

Here’s what I know about the billable hour in two paragraphs: if you’re still making your firm’s financial plans and profitability projections based on hourly rates and billed time, please stop now. A lawyer’s billable rate is meaningless. It isn’t based on anything real and it doesn’t measure anything real, either qualitatively or quantitatively. It is, for practical purposes, a made-up number. Ask any lawyer where his or her billable-hour rate comes from, and you’ll get answers based on the lawyer’s year of call, the going rate for lawyers of his or her approximate rank, and the amount required to cover his or her costs. None of these has anything to do with the market value of the lawyer’s work, and none of them is remotely connected with the client’s interests.

The clients know this very well, as ACC GC Susan Hackett points out: “clients are increasingly uninterested in rates at all; they are increasingly focused on the all-in cost of the work. Rates are becoming irrelevant to many clients, who say: ‘I really don’t care what your rates are — that’s not my problem; this is what I’m willing to pay for the work, since this is what it’s worth, and you figure it out from there.’” The most important fee-related fact that lawyers need to digest is that the day of the hourly rate has passed — not because clients killed it, but because they finally realized it wasn’t worth killing, only ignoring. Your hourly rate is an imaginary number that clients don’t care about. I don’t know how I can make it any plainer than that.

Here’s what I know about fixed fees in two paragraphs: they will not work unless you have a down-to-the-decimal-point understanding of your own costs and procedures and you’re willing and able to implement process improvements. Ron Friedmann of Integreon identifies a series of process, technology and human resources steps firms must take in order to make effective use of AFAs. Fixed-fee billing makes systematization necessary, but it won’t magically produce systematization by itself. “After a certain period of time, all a fixed fee arrangement offers is what the cost is going to be, not how the work can be done more efficiently, for less money, more intuitively, or in a manner in which you can best meet your goals,” says Barry Willms of Counsel on Call. Fixed-fee billing without cost control is a short road to bankruptcy.

The other important thing about fixed fees is that they’re an enterprise solution. They need to underpin your whole business model, not just parts of it. “To assure profitability, any form of alternative billing must involve enough cases to balance out the potential for losses and unique situations,” says Ed Wesemann. “… Unfortunately, the tendency of most firms is to stick their toe in the water and experiment with a limited number of alternative fee matters.  This almost guarantees that a firm will lose money on its investment. … The more cases involved, the more proficient the firm becomes in estimating cost, managing resources and hedging risk.” Flat-fee lawyer Jay Shepherd adds that he doesn’t track whether single files make or lose money — only whether the firm as a whole is profitable or not. So by all means, use fixed fees if your entire firm is set up around them and if you have excellent command of your costs and procedures. If not, approach with extreme caution.

That’s hourly and flat-fee billing in fewer than 600 words. The important point is that billing is not where you start the conversation about change; it’s where you end it. Your pricing system is a symptom or effect or afterthought of a larger question: how do you operate your law business? Before you jump from one billing approach to another, ask yourself: How do we create and deliver services of value to our clients? How do we measure our professionals’ productivity, and is that method meaningful and defensible? Are we carrying out our tasks efficiently and systematically, and are we tracking every resource we spend to carry those tasks out? That’s where your focus needs to be right now, not on how your services are priced.

A legal billing system needs to be rational, analyzable, systematic, client-friendly, and above all, integrated with how you do business. If your billing approach has these features, it doesn’t matter if you bill by the hour or the day or the case or the moon’s gravitational pull — it will work just fine. All the sound and fury about AFAs referenced above signifies nothing more than clients telling lawyers to change the way they do business. They recognize that in too many law firms, the billing system is the tail that wags the dog. It’s time for lawyers to finally reach the same conclusion.

The fundamental client objection to lawyers’ fees is uncertainty: the client rarely knows the final price before the work is done. Neither, in most cases, does the lawyer — either because the price is truly unpredictable or, far more likely, because the lawyer has neither the means nor the incentives nor the inclination to figure it out beforehand. The fundamental variability of legal fees powers a business model that has proven enormously profitable for lawyers: because the fee varies according to the amount of time and effort devoted to the task, the lawyer has every incentive to maximize that time and effort. Uncertainty creates risk — 100% to the client — and reward — 100% to the lawyer.

The radical change facing law firms today is the end of variable fees as law firms’ financial engine and their replacement with non-variable fees — or, in the parlance of the day, fixed fees. Evidence continues to emerge not only that fixed fees are the immediate future of how lawyers’ services are sold, but also that they’re long-term future of how lawyers’ entire businesses operate.

Fees that vary according to the lawyer production process, rising in tandem with time and effort expended, naturally give rise to inefficient workflow, reinvented wheels, maximized activity and over-accomplished tasks. Conversely, fees that are fixed in advance by the purchaser naturally give rise to proportional efforts, recycled know-how, streamlined processes and hyper-efficient workflow. The first type of law firm business model is starting a steep decline; the second is in sharp ascendancy. In the result, we’re going to witness a sea change in the culture and operations of many law firms. It’s not destiny or professional genetics that makes law firms houses of horror for both the lawyers who sweat to docket the hours and the clients who grimly pay for them — it’s the fever grip of the variable fee. The rise of the fixed-fee-driven law firm is going to demonstrate just how different and better a law firm can be.

Two examples: first, an excellent article at LegalBizDev by Steve Barrett, former CMO of Drinker Biddle, with a title that says it all: “Alternative fees demand improved project management.” It argues that any firm thinking about adopting a fixed-fee approach to sales must be prepared to overhaul its internal systems and business culture. Fixed-fee firms can’t survive massive writeoffs by lawyers who made clients promises about price that they couldn’t keep, or succeed without tracking the progress of past fixed-fee approaches and instituting technological tools to analyze them. And no firm can even contemplate fixed fees without a very clear understanding of the most important aspect of their business: what it has cost them in the past to deliver their services:

Many firms mentioned that a good understanding of cost patterns has never been developed in their firms.  One said (paraphrasing) “We should know how much an ‘XYZ financing transaction’ typically costs, since we do hundreds of them every year.”  Another (again, paraphrasing) said “I can’t believe we don’t know the cost of a typical deposition, since we must do thousands a year.”

As clients ratchet up the pressure on their lawyers to deliver results on a fixed-fee basis, firms will be obliged — forced is probably a better word — to implement these systems and gather and use this data. Just as the variable-fee model discouraged the adoption of these processes and approaches, fixed-fee models will require it.

Second example: firms’ use of associates. Pamela Woldow and James Cotterman of Altman Weil warned law firms in a recent seminar on associate compensation that they need to cut associate salaries much more deeply and accept the fact that clients will never again pay for new associates billed out by the hour. Clients would much rather rely on their own contract lawyers or on offshore professionals than on inexperienced associates; but the opportunity to train associates with this work –  and, much more, the ability to generate revenue off these associates’ billed hours — is key to law firms’ success. The solution to this impasse: fixed fees.

Woldow pointed out that corporate clients are more amenable to using first- and second-years on their matters in fixed-fee arrangements. “So if you really want to use and train your first- and second-years, then up the alternative fee arrangements,” she said.

Endless battalions of associates only make sense in a variable-fee system. When the amount of money you make is tied directly to the number of people working on a file and the amount of time they take to do it, you have every incentive to increase both. In a fixed-fee system, profitability flows in precisely the opposite direction: fewer people hired, fewer hours spent. Law firms that abandon variable-fee structures will shortly find themselves completely rethinking how many associates they hire, how much they pay them, and what tasks those associates are assigned. Under a fixed-fee system, a firm that genuinely wants to train its associates can afford to do so, not least because there’ll be fewer of them — the demand for associates will plummet, along with their cost.

As variable fees give way to fixed fees, we’re seeing a corresponding shift of burdens from the client to the lawyer: the risk of financial shortfall, the maintenance and analysis of relevant data, the obligation to control costs, the necessity of working smarter, the requirement to properly define productivity, and the responsibility to prioritize value. These changes are poised to transform lawyers’ incentives, processes, systems, and attitudes — for the better. Forget the billable hour: the future of law practice is tied to whether lawyers’ fees remain variable — or, put differently, to whether the client or the lawyer decides how much the client will pay. If I were you, I’d bet on the side that’s holding the money.

That observation comes from Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith Esq., and I share his concern that false confidence will lead too many large firms to believe that everything’s going to be basically okay. For large firms, everything is emphatically not okay.  The past couple of weeks have delivered a series of examples that demonstrate one thing: the ways in which large law firms have operated over the past few decades are coming to an abrupt end.

First, consider this this Legalweek report that two major international firms, Mayer Brown and Reed Smith, are jumping onto the fixed-fees bandwagon. Mayer Brown is readying itself to offer fixed fees for all its transactional work, as well as to make more frequent use of abort agreements and success fees. Reed Smith, meanwhile, plans to use fixed or capped fees in its financial industry group, in its corporate and real estate practices, and for transactional work.

What brought about this sudden departure from the easy-and-profitable billable-hour system? The firms’ leaders cite client relationships first and foremost, which is nice to hear. But perhaps equally instructive are two other articles linked from that Legalweek story: 55 job cuts at Mayer Brown in March, Reed Smith hiring a restructuring consultant in July. Few firms undertake changes of this potential magnitude unless the outside pressures exerted on them have made things very uncomfortable. (It’s worth noting, as Jim Hassett’s webcast does, that these are not the first AmLaw 100 firms to  climb onboard this train.)

Even more revealing are the contents of a leaked strategy memo from O’Melveny & Myers that appeared on Above The Law. The firm plans to “adopt a single rate card by FY2012, with volume and ‘investment’ discounts and appropriate alternative fee arrangements … becoming the leader in providing high-end legal services on a fixed fee basis, reducing costs to clients and achieving superior economic performance through practice management oriented toward cost effective client service.” Especially noteworthy are plans to reduce associate leverage to as low as 2-1, a ratio that’s positively Canadian.

Fixed fees, if done right (a big if), are demonstrably better both for the client and the lawyer. The question is whether large firms constructed on billable-hour pyramids can really adapt their culture and systems to make such a monumental change. Many big firms still think the key to flat fees is to take the last ten bills issued for this kind of work, average them out, add 10% for contingency, and present the final figure with a flourish. Fixed-fee veterans in smaller firms are skeptical, to say the least. Here’s Valorem’s Patrick J. Lamb on these big firms’ moves:

The essential element of alternative fees that actually work is that they shift risk to law firms, meaning the value changes from leverage and body count to experience and fewer bodies.  More brain power, less body count.  So a goal of reducing leverage “in some practices” to “as low as” 2 to 1 will make anyone experienced with alternative fees laugh out loud.  O’Melveny might as well take out a full page advertisement saying it really won’t be changing a damn thing.

I’m prepared to give O’Melveny’s initiative the benefit of the doubt, actually — every journey has to start somewhere, and I want to encourage every green shoot of innovation I see. But man, is this a long journey — changing a law firm’s fee and billing structure is like re-engineering your DNA, and the best will in the world won’t make it any less difficult. And for every large firm that is finally acknowledging that the horse they’ve ridden for years has died, ten more are still clinging on to the saddle.

The O’Melveny memo states at one point: “In the very recent past, our business model, as a whole, has yielded disappointing financial and practice growth results. … [O]ur litigation clients are looking for rate and fee reductions, and we expect that mindset will continue into the next good economy and beyond.”  That understates the size of the challenge. It’s not just litigation clients — a lawyer at a large firm confirms to me that the pressure for lower and/or more predictable costs is intense and is coming from across the client spectrum. This is the new reality, and large firms will struggle to make the sort of fundamental changes needed to adapt.

Let’s look at another key element of law firm success: personnel. The results of a survey published in The American Lawyer are interesting, if not surprising: associates in large firms are measurably more unhappy than their counterparts in smaller firms. Not only that, but graduates of the “elite law schools,” from which so many big firms insist on drawing most of their recruits, are the unhappiest of all when compared to their colleagues from “less elite” schools. (It doesn’t help that, as Ron Fox points out, law schools of every rank tend to funnel their graduates towards large firms and away from opportunities to serve ordinary consumers in smaller practices.)

You can probably guess the advice that the study’s authors offer big firms as an antidote: recruit outside your usual law school boxes, and make life for your new lawyers a little less punitive. It’s advice unlikely to be accepted, says Aric Press, editor-in-chief of American Lawyer: “I fear that we will look back at the exuberant spree of the last few years as the high-water mark of nonelite law school hiring. … This leaves an opportunity for the firms wise enough to seek first-class talent no matter what brand is on a diploma.” But how many firms will risk the CYA comfort of consistently recruiting from “the best and the brightest,” let alone make substantive changes to the overall associate model?

The study’s authors note that big-firm attrition is particularly frequent among women and minorities. Underlining that concern is this account of an event celebrating Working Mother magazine’s 50 Best Firms for Women Lawyers. Many of last year’s winners didn’t make the cut this time — in part, perhaps, because despite wishful thinking to the contrary, leaner times at big firms have made it harder, not easier, for women to advance and succeed:

It’s optimistic to believe that most large law firms are rethinking the work/life balance equation during these hard times. Frankly, most firms today are focused on survival and on a need to bring in more business — they are not, it seems, focusing on the larger questions of the meaning of work and job satisfaction. From where we sit, covering women in the profession for almost a decade, we don’t see a revolution on the horizon.

So: profits are dropping fast, more firms are getting ready to change the basic business model, the young talent is alienated, and diversity has been back-burnered. But that’s not the worst of it for big law firms. Because all this time, solos, small firms and midsize operations keep picking up all the opportunities that the large firms keep dropping.

While big firms allow women to walk away, one small firm encourages its employees to bring their children to work — not to an on-site day-care, but into the office, all day long. While big firms burn through their young talent, innovative companies like DirectLaw offer new lawyers reduced pricing to start up a solo virtual law platform — with 90 days’ free tuition to Solo Practice University to boot. While big firms set up committees to consider fixed fees, small firms have long since figured it out and will even tell you, as Jay Shepherd does, how they set their prices. All the momentum in the legal services marketplace today favours small, adaptable, innovative, client-focused, value-oriented, business-savvy providers. Most large law firms answer to immobile, traditional, self-centered, profit-oriented, and business-challenged. It’s not hard to pick the winner here.

Every marketplace, even one as artificially stunted as legal services, operates according to the law of supply and demand. The demand is changing, irrevocably. The suppliers that change with it will survive; the ones who don’t, won’t. Some more large firms are waking up to this fact and doing their best to change — but I’m concerned that 2009 is simply too late to be starting the change process.

Exhibit A, which you’ve surely read about by now, is the decision by international mining giant Rio Tinto to send $100 million worth of legal work annually to a team of lawyers in India. This is not back-office administrative work of the type that, say, Clifford Chance has been sending overseas. This is associate-level legal work like document review and contract drafting, and you can call it “commodity” work if you like, but there’s tons of it and it keeps many large firms profitable. It represents $100 million that Rio paid its outside law firms last year but won’t pay this year or, probably, ever again. With an offshoring project of this size and scale, Rio is obliterating the “legal work” distinction that many firms have long believed insulated them from the effects of outsourcing.  And it won’t stop there, as Richard Susskind notes in a commentary for the Times:

People often assume that outsourcing and the options are applicable only to high-volume, low-value legal work. The Rio Tinto deal confirms this is wrong. There is no legal job whose complexity and value elevates it entirely beyond market forces. The reality is that significant parts of even the biggest transactions and disputes are repetitive and routine; and in-house lawyers will be delighted that these can be packaged out to less costly providers.

Rio Tinto’s move is bad news for traditional law firms in two ways. First, the outsourced Indian lawyers are doing this work for one-seventh the cost of traditional outside counsel. Think about that: firms have lately been offering their clients rate discounts of up to 10% and feeling magnanimous about the sacrifice, and here comes CPA Global doing the same work for 85% less. That’s a stunning cost savings, and it doesn’t just change law firms’ playing field, it destroys it: it reduces any proffered “rate discount” to  irrelevance. Rio Tinto has served notice to its outside counsel that the price bar for this type of work  has been reset at a radically lower level, permanently. It should go without saying that traditional law firms can’t compete for that work at that price, not as they’re currently structured.

But maybe more importantly, Rio Tinto’s move feels like a momentum shifter. Its own sheer size as a client, and the mammoth scale of the outsourcing commitment it’s making, should have enough critical mass to really get things moving within a legal marketplace that, despite recent upheavals, has yet to make real, radical alterations to its business. Rio is not the first law department to send legal work offshore, far from it — but it’s a very visible example of what Seth Godin called Guy #3 , the participant whose entry breaks the ice and gives everyone else “permission” or cover to join.

Rio is sending a message to other law departments that legal work can be exported en masse to India without GCs having to automatically fear for their jobs. And it’s sending a message to law firms that the game has changed — a message some firms have received. Just a couple of days after Rio’s move, large UK firm Pinsent Masons announced it’s sending litigation work to lawyers in South Africa, while competitor Simmons & Simmons is preparing to send its own legal work to India, Australia or South Africa. This quote from Simmons managing partner Mark Dawkins is gold: “We’re not going to defend a business model that clients don’t want to have to pay for.” It’s really as simple as that — it always has been — and the reality on the ground is now starting to reflect that.

What’s really interesting, though, is that this momentum isn’t restricted to outsourcing — look around the legal marketplace and you can start to feel real momentum shifts in numerous places.

Consider firms’ treatment of new associates: after peaking  at $160,000, starting associate salaries have been in retreat for a few months now, to no one’s surprise. What was surprising was last month’s decision by Philadelphia-based firm Drinker Biddle to chop those salaries to $105,000 but add training and apprenticeship services for these new lawyers. “In some ways, we intend for your experience in your first six months to be a bit of a throwback to how lawyers ‘grew up’ in their firms literally only a few decades ago, before the rise of the billable hour,” the firm wrote to its incoming associates. Within a month, Cincinnati firm Frost Brown Todd followed suit. (Defenders of the articling year at Canadian law firms are probably feeling pretty good right now.)

And then, just a few days ago, large international firm Howrey LLP played the Rio role and announced it was cutting associates’ pay but increasing their training. Howrey has a track record of paying attention to how its lawyers learn (and, interestingly enough, in outsourcing to India too) — its Howrey Virtual University has been providing coordinated firm-wide web-based lawyer training since 2005. Howrey managing partner Robert Ruyak’s words are also noteworthy: “The old model is broken. You’re bringing on these extremely bright individuals and letting them waste their careers buried in documents where they aren’t really learning the practical skills it takes to be a lawyer.“ The comment board at Above The Law, which invariably trashes any law firm decision that doesn’t involve more pay and less work, reacted positively to Howrey’s move overall — nearly 70% of poll respondents said they’d take the deal if it was offered to them. My guess is that right now, many large law firms are watching Howrey closely and treating it as their advance scout — like Rio, Howrey is a substantial player whose participation can and should tip the balance toward change.

There are other examples. Look at the recent frenzy of reports of law firms pricing their work at “fixed fees” — we’ve heard about flat-fee or fixed-fee initiatives underway at traditional firms like Alston & Bird, Lightfoot Franklin & White, Kirkland & Ellis, Simmons & Simmons (there they are again) and Morrison & Foerster, to name a few. Law firms generally still don’t understand fixed fees — here are some excellent critiques of their mindset and methodology from Tim Corcoran, Patrick J. Lamb and Jay Shepherd — and “alternative fees” are by and large still that, alternative.

But now along comes respected midsize firm Saul Ewing, creating a “cost certainty commitment” that standardizes fixed-fee arrangements with clients. Again, what’s unique here isn’t so much the offering as the prominent, high-profile way in which it’s being rolled out — the key to building momentum is to be seen to build momentum. From the Legal Intelligencer article: “Altman Weil’s Pamela Woldow said Saul Ewing’s cost certainty commitment is certainly unique. She said she isn’t aware of any other firm that has created such a program and made such a public, formal commitment by putting it on its website.” All of these moves — Rio Tinto’s, Howrey’s, Saul Ewing’s — are significant largely because of the signal they’re sending, quite intentionally, to the other members of the marketplace that things have changed.

Going first, and doing so conspicuously, is incredibly important to change in the law. It’s conventional wisdom to blame lawyers’ reluctance to innovate on the fact that they hate being first movers, that they much prefer to stand back and let someone else make the initial move. And that’s true as far as it goes, maybe even more so  for in-house lawyers than for private practitioners.  But the corollary to that is that lawyers also don’t like being the last ones to join the club. Ron Friedmann explains this very well by using “a discontinuous step-shaped function” to describe lawyers’ willingness to change:

Consider adoption in the legal market of e-mail, document management, marketing, lateral moves, or mergers. For each, there seemed to be only a few firms doing it and then, quite suddenly, many or all were. The “step function” reflects lawyer decision making: the first few adopters change slowly, gingerly, and quietly. Everyone wants to follow so once you have a dozen adopters, “the coast is clear” and the rest rush in.

“Gradually and then suddenly,” as Hemingway once put it — lawyers hate being  the first to change, but equally they don’t want to be the last ones left out in the cold. Law firms constantly monitor each other and the legal marketplace to see what’s going on, who’s doing what, and whether there’s anything big happening they should be part of. They’re watching for the “prominent first movers” Rees Morrison talked about in the Rio Tinto context. Once they feel that enough people have jumped into the water and declared it safe — once the reputational and financial risks of change have been taken and minimized by others — then they’re ready to leap, and if they sense a rush of movement among their competitors, they’ll even push each other out of the way to be the next ones in line.

I think that’s where we are today. In all sorts of ways, in many different aspects of the legal profession, first movers are forging ahead and dictating a new energy and direction, while the great silent vastness behind them watches closely and prepares to shift and follow. Momentum — mass times velocity — is an incredibly powerful force; we’re about to see it channeled through the legal services marketplace.

Essentially, WLB was shorthand for the widespread sense that the demands of a legal career had outstripped the personal benefits it conferred — or, as my father used to say, “There’s not much point in earning a living if you can’t live the living you’re earning.” WLB was applied most frequently within the context of large law firms, where even jaded observers would admit that billable-hour targets had escaped any rational trajectory. Across all firm sizes, though, people looked at the law and saw a career where effort and satisfaction were headed in opposite directions. It was not irrational to think that this could stand some improvement.

(It’s important to recognize, by the way, that WLB was not exclusively a Millennial issue. Lawyers of all ages reported dissatisfaction with the perceived effort/reward ratio of their careers, especially in larger firms — though Gen Y was the most willing to talk about it, at length. Remember that WLB was also often used to describe the plight of older small-firm lawyers whose clients had come to demand legal services far more quickly and cheaply than before, catching the lawyer in a vise between ever more work and ever less time. Wherever legal work seemed to grow beyond the boundaries of “worth it,” we heard about WLB.)

Most lawyers seeking WLB were really seeking an answer to the question: “Does a legal career have to be all-consuming and exhausting?” As to that, I’ve written before that lawyers now work long hours thanks to a competitive economy and our own inefficiency, and that we’ll always have to run fast enough to keep up with our clients. But during the economic bubble, lawyers who asked that question often perceived that the answer was “no.” The demand for legal services sufficiently outstripped the supply of lawyers, such that lawyers could start to dictate the terms of their availability to employers and sometimes even to clients. The whole thing got wrapped up too often in buzzwords like “personal fulfillment,” “family time,” and WLB, but what it really came down to was lawyers’ rational response to market conditions. They had a chance to get more rewards for their time and effort — unfortunately, many of them chose those rewards in $160,000 annual packages.

Now, of course, the market has changed just a little. After 10,000 lawyer and staff layoffs at large US and UK firms, even the most active WLB boosters have toned down talk that might earn them the dreaded “entitlement” label. Articles and posts that reference the term “work-life balance” now do so in an environment of cold pragmatism: Ashby Jones at the WSJ Law Blog and Dawn Wagenaar at The Complete Lawyer provide good recent examples. Realist observers like Dan Hull and Scott Greenfield have gained the upper hand in the WLB discussion — check out this slam-bang debate at Legal OnRamp about “work-life balance” generational expectations.

Where proponents of “work-life balance” went off-track, to my mind, was that they argued the duty to ensure a satisfactory proportion between a lawyer’s work and the rest of her life was an institutional responsibility — that it was up to the law firm, basically. The  firms disagreed, and all they had to do was wait for the marketplace to turn their way to make that clear.

Law firms aren’t going to unilaterally change their business models for the sake of WLB. No law firm ever budged an inch on its billable quotas or offered associates more money and perks because its partners genuinely felt they should be nicer employers — appeals to conscience at partners’ meetings don’t have a roaring record of success. Firms change their working conditions as the talent market dictates. In a seller’s market like the one we’ve just had, they play nice; in a buyer’s market like this, they don’t. If almost every potential legal recruit said, “I’m not going to work at that firm — the demands are ridiculous and the benefits to my career aren’t nearly worth it,” and did so for several consecutive years, then you’d see the firm think about changing its business model. That didn’t even happen during the boom, and I doubt it’s going to happen now.

The thing is, “work-life balance” is a lawyer’s personal choice and responsibility. If money and “prestige” are that important to you, you’ll sign up to work 3,000 hours a year at a law firm, and you can reap the rewards and suffer the personal consequences accordingly. If keeping your work hours within a predictable box is important to you, you’ll be seeking out public-sector jobs or setting up a practice with just enough reasonable clients to pay the mortgage — and you’ll always have one eye on your bank statements. When we talk about “balance” in lawyers’ lives, we’re really talking about the tradeoff everyone has to make between compensation and lifestyle. If WLB stood for anything, it was for the fact that we all have the right and the obligation to make that tradeoff on the terms we want.

But here’s the caveat, and here’s where “work-life balance” proponents were right –  most lawyers in their first several years of practice don’t really have that choice. There are two institutional flaws in our system that hurt our newest colleagues. First, there’s the unspoken symbiosis between law schools and law firms — the former charge students huge amounts of money and provide little practical lawyer training, allowing the latter to hire low-skilled and heavily indebted graduates to fill virtually the only positions lucrative enough to pay off their loans. And secondly, billable-hour targets for associates at more than a few firms simply can’t be achieved without damage to one’s health or ethics, or both. These problems are neither natural nor inevitable — they result from our neglect of the system, and they annually damage our profession’s standards and morale.

In the heyday of WLB, we were at least starting to talk about these things, and the whole debate should have shined a light directly on them. What we were groping towards, under the banner of WLB, was the gnawing sense that most everyone starts their legal career behind the eight-ball for no particularly good reason. Now that the moment has passed, I worry that WLB will be relegated to the status of a mere generational quarrel during a freak economy. We need to do better than that. There are still some serious institutional problems for our profession to resolve — dealing with them openly and effectively would be the kind of legacy “work-life balance” deserves.

It seemed to me at the time (and still does now) that putting up a very tall building, while an arduous and lengthy task, is also a pretty straightforward and orderly one. While traffic might be rerouted and the noise pollution might be substantial, still it’s a planned, supervised, rational process with a fixed start and reasonably fixed end date. But if you ever need to take that building down, what do you do? I’ve never seen anyone erect a scaffolding superstructure around a skyscraper and deconstruct it floor by floor. Generally speaking, buildings aren’t dismantled gradually, their component parts carefully carried off to be reused and rearranged for new or better buildings; they come down all at once in a destructive collapse. Sometimes they videotape the implosion, to be replayed at the end of a half-hour news cycle.

This brings me, in a roundabout sort of way, to the billable hour — specifically, a recent wave of articles that suggests a serious challenge to its lengthy rule is underway. Famously, Cravath Swaine & Moore managing partner Evan Chesler published an article in the Jan. 12, 2009 issue of Forbes titled “Kill the billable hour,” in which he sets out clients’ (and lawyers’) unhappiness with and alternatives to the billable hour. As you might imagine, that got a lot of people’s immediate attention. The AmLaw Daily noted a number of resonant examples in the U.S. profession, while lawyers in London piped up that they’re already ahead of that particular curve, thanks.

Around the same time, The American Lawyer named as its Litigation Boutique of the Year the Chicago firm of Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott LLP, a crack litigation team remarkable in no small part for not billing by the hour and keeping few associates on hand. Based on all this and more, Legal OnRamp‘s Paul Lippe suggests we’re witnessing an actual, real-time change in the legal profession’s billing mindset. And Michael Grodhaus wonders if those who switch away from the billable hour during the recession will ever go back.

Me, I keep thinking back to those towers. Just as they took a long time to go up and won’t come down without a lot of noise and debris, so too the law firms inside them took many years to build, and if they ever need to be, um, re-purposed, it won’t be easy or painless. Buildings are demolished when their structural underpinnings become unstable or their basic design is rendered obsolete by new advances; occasionally you’ll see a retrofit, but most often you’ll see the wrecking ball, because something that big and rigid just can’t be reduced, reused or recycled.

I was prompted in this direction after reading a series of insightful posts by Toby Brown and Greg Lambert at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog. Toby started it by asking a really important question that hasn’t been asked often enough: how, exactly, does an existing law firm move away from the billable hour to a broader, more rational billing and compensation system? Let’s assume we all agree that the billable hour must go — what’s the next step?  How do you make that kind of fundamental change — and it is fundamental, striking to the core of many firms’ cultures and business models — in practical terms?

In my opinion, this is the challenge. Sitting down and talking with clients about value and price may be a new thing for lawyers, but it is not a particularly daunting task. In contrast, changing the entire way a firm functions will be a monumental challenge. Law firms’ entire structure is built on the billable hour. The way we intake business, the way we manage our knowledge, the way we hire and ‘train’ our people and most importantly the way we compensate our lawyers. The last point is especially important because “you get what you pay for.”

Toby followed this up with another post on the risk/reward split between lawyers and clients, and then Greg chimed in with some key observations about the many people in a firm who don’t bill by the hour. What they’re driving at, I think, is that the practical implications of shifting a law firm away from a billable hour system are enormous.

It’s not as easy as simply saying, “Okay, we’re going to adopt a more sophisticated, client-focused way to bill clients and compensate lawyers that better reflects value and rewards productivity.” That’s a great idea and every law firm should be set up this way; but how does an existing firm with massive institutional momentum actually accomplish that? How do you replace the engine, rewire the electrical system and change all the tires on a fully-loaded 18-wheeler thundering down the highway? How do you rebuild a office tower from the ground up with people still working inside? I’m coming to suspect that the answer, in many cases, might turn out to be: you can’t.

Look at the successful firms that have adopted innovative billing and compensation models, the likes of Summit, Valorem, Exemplar, Shepherd Law Group, and Bartlit Beck: small or midsize boutiques founded within the last decade or so, often by lawyers who left large firms. It’s much more feasible to adopt a better and more rational financial structure when starting a firm from scratch than it is to take an existing, legacy law firm and completely replace its financial foundation. The business and cultural costs of the latter approach just seem like they’d be extraordinary. The best-intentioned and most wisely led legacy firms might be able to pull it off, but surely those are the exceptions within the profession, not the rule.

A few months back, I wrote a post about innovation that suggested the options available to lawyers could be classified as “Repainting or renovating.” As a declining economy and demanding marketplace continue to tighten a vise grip around the profession, I’m starting to think that might underestimate the enormity of the challenge facing many firms. I’m starting to think that in a lot of cases, there’s only one way to re-purpose large structures that have been standing around for a long time.

First is this National Law Journal article about how law firms are responding to the recession (short answer: myopically). Among other things, firms are laying off staff and paralegals in droves, perhaps in part because underutilized associates are keeping for themselves the work they normally delegate to these para-professionals:

“It’s a desperate move to keep their billables up,” said [Chere Estrin of paralegal training company Estrin LegalEd], noting that paralegals have told her that some associates are doing their own document reviews, deposition summaries and other research. “It’s gotten worse lately, and it’s not good for anyone.”

Not good for the paralegals, vulnerable employees placed at greater risk of layoffs in an economic storm. Not good for the associates, whose legal skills atrophy as they rediscover how many words they can type per minute. And not, by the way, so good for clients who wind up paying associate-level prices for staff-level work. Pretty good for the firm’s bottom line, though.

Difficult as it might seem to trump that story, this one manages it: “Down in the Data Mines,” an aptly titled article in December’s ABA Journal. It’s a first-person account of a contract lawyer labouring in a New York City basement doing document review for a large law firm (HT to Ron Friedmann). Here’s the most telling, and appalling, excerpt:

If I review 100 documents per hour (a very fast pace), I get paid the same hourly rate as if I review 30. More­over, each project consists of a finite number of documents; so the faster I work, the sooner I am out of a job and need to start hustling for the next project. “Don’t work us out of a job,” a veteran contract attorney once derided me in private after I reviewed too many documents on the first day of a new project. And the firm is usually OK with this attitude; in my experience, speed and accuracy have always taken backstage to billable hours.

We’ve pretty well established that the billable hour is harmful to the lawyer-client relationship, and these two articles provide evidence for that. But what we don’t talk about as often is that the billable hour is far more damaging — poisonous, actually — to the relationship between a law firm and its employees.

We need to start by emphasizing the two related but distinct ways in which “the billable hour” is used in the legal profession. In the lawyer-client relationship, it represents a method (or a regime) by which lawyers’ services are billed to the client — a construct for the terms of purchase and sale, nothing more. And there are situations where the billable hour is completely legitimate as a fee methodology. We most often cite examples like a complicated merger or a difficult divorce. But the billable hour would be appropriate in any transaction between a lawyer and client who know each other, trust each other, and have established transparency around the means by which the cost and value of the service is calculated.

The problem, of course, is that that kind of relationship is rare between lawyers and clients. More commonly, clients don’t trust lawyers to name a just fee for the work they did, and lawyers don’t trust clients not to take advantage of cost estimates and time parameters. In those situations (far more common in larger firms than in smaller or sole practices), the billable hour is rife with the potential for abuse by the lawyer, who holds the upper hand in an opaque, awkward relationship. But it’s important to recognize that the billable hour is essentiallya surrogate for trust between lawyer and client, one that could (and hopefully will) someday be replaced when the relationship becomes more mature, transparent, and equal. The billable hour is not really the fundamental problem — a relationship short on experience and bereft of trust is.

A lawyer and client look forward to the day when their relationship is sufficiently strong that the billable hour becomes irrelevant — it falls away from the relationship like a baby tooth replaced by an adult one. But there’s no similar hope for the other manifestation of the billable hour: a measure of lawyers’ productivity, compensation and advancement in most law firms. Every lawyer, from the rawest associate to the oldest partner, is scrutinized annually on the basis of the number of hours he or she has billed to clients. You never outgrow it and you never escape it – it’s a permanent, pernicious blot on the law firm landscape.

One of the oldest rules of economics is that people value that for which they are compensated. Compensate a lawyer on the basis of year-end client reviews, and that lawyer will move mountains to ensure satisfied clients. Compensate her on the basis of revenues actually brought in (rather than hours billed), and she’ll be a collections fiend, billing regularly and following up to make sure there’s no outstanding work lingering in the pipeline. But compensate a lawyer for the number of hours he invoices to clients, and that lawyer will lowball everything else — efficiency, timeliness, value, communication, even ethics — in order to maximize the amount of time he can take to address a client’s request. That’s the kind of lawyer our law firms have bred and unleashed on the marketplace for half a century.

Look at contract lawyers working slowly and inefficiently to bloat billable hour totals. Look at associates typing their own documents to sustain billable hour totals. Look at partners hoarding work from their associates in order to maintain billable hour totals. Fundamentally, instinctively even, lawyers know that how many hours they’ve managed to bill does not reflect how good they are at what they do. But under irresistible pressure, they twist their instincts and corrupt sensible business practices in order to conform to their employers’ business models and value systems. Organizations filled with people going about their business in ways that satisfy neither themselves nor the people they serve are going to be deeply unhappy places, and that’s what many law firms are.

Law firms have managed a feat you would have thought impossible: taken smart, dedicated, hard-working young men and women who are passionate, even geeky about the law, introduced them into one of the world’s finest and noblest professions, and within just a few years, made them hate it.

Here’s a question every law firm should have to answer: if you never billed another client by the hour, how would you compensate your lawyers? The fact is that few law firms would have the first clue what to do. They’d have to sit down and figure out how much value that lawyer delivered to clients and to the firm, a difficult exercise that requires a lot of research and judgment calls. They’d have to set multi-faceted performance expectations at the start of each year, mentor and follow up with the lawyer regularly to ensure those expectations are being met, and deliver an assessment at year’s end, all in the context of a employment relationship where each side respects the other more than they do now. Difficult, and a lot more work — but not impossible, and absolutely delivering a more accurate result.

Law firms assess and compensate lawyers by the hour for much the same reasons they charge clients by the hour: it’s convenient, and they can get away with it. The convenience will never go away — the billable hour is as lazy and facile a method of assessing employee value as you could ask for — but the tolerance level is finally starting to fade. We’ve seen a rising client revolt against the weakness of billable-hour pricing; I think we might be on the cusp of a rising lawyer revolt against the weakness of billable-hour compensation. Talk of a generational divide in law firms has faded with the onset of the recession, but it’s still there, and one of the ways it manifests itself is in very different ways of actualizing a person’s value. I don’t think Millennials are keen to be assessed and paid according to hours posted. I don’t think they’re going to buy that at all.

Billable selling and billable compensating are inextricably linked, and I doubt we’ll see one disappear entirely while the other thrives unaffected. Law firms, take note: every tiny step away from a billable-hour system for charging clients is also a tiny step towards the inevitable day when you’ll have to buckle down and actually figure out what your lawyers are worth to you and to your clients. You probably won’t enjoy that; but you’ll be a lot better off once you’ve done it.