16 Comments

OK, if they’re charging her for phone calls that didn’t take place, or racking up charges by dragging their heels on simple matters, that’s uncalled for. But if you send correspondence, you ought to be able to charge for that. What’s implausible or unreasonable is not that she got charged for an e-mail, but the claim that it took 12 minutes. Round up to .1 if you must, but don’t pretend that it took you .2 to write that.

As house counsel for a large retailer, I thought I’d seen everything until a firm we had on retainer called to complain that we had hired an in-house lawyer to do Wage & Hour work formerly done by their firm. I didn’t think much of it until the following month’s bill arrived containing a charge for three hours that constituted the calls and letters spent in complaining about our hire.

But if you send correspondence, you ought to be able to charge for that.

You are kidding, right? Would that mean if you called up a car dealship to see if your car was repaired, you would accept them billing you for answering your question?

Or if you went to an electronics store to buy a TV, asking lots of questions, you would feel comfortable having the bill be larger simply because they spent more time with you at the expense of other customers?

The irony here is if the woman hadn’t sent the simple email, and the law firm had tried to contact her, they would have billed her for that as well.

These billing practices are commonplace. Recently I reviewed a firm’s bill where they charges 0.2 to review a client’s email and 0.1 to forward it to me. The forwarding email to me simply said “FYI”. At $250/hr that’s a $25 email for three letters.

Attorneys often (fraudulently IMHO) believe they can bill a 0.1 any time they lift a finger when it is more equitable to round down to 0.0 for a task that takes less than three minutes and round up to 0.1 when a task takes from three to six minutes. Round down to 0.1 for tasks six to eleven minutes and so on.

Maybe there’s a class action lurking. Wouldn’t that be great.

Sorry, gotta defend the lawyers here. Most of us sell our time, so every little bit counts. The car dealership doesn’t bill for the courtesy call about the repair because they can bill for the repair itself. A .2 might have been a wee high for that, but… maybe not. It sounds like something I might have billed (you do have to read the e-mail before you respond to it, ya know.)

If billable hour attorneys skipped every little thing like this, their day’s billing would disappear. I did insurance defense, and every little nickel counted. And I can tell you associates would rather run afoul of an angry client for OVERBILLING than an angry partner for UNDERBILLING.

gitarcarver – The charge for the courtesy e-mail was out of line and your car dealer analogy captures that aspect of this situation. However, there is nothing wrong with being charged in the electronics store hypothetical if there was a prior agreement to pay for the advice, especially if the advice confers a benefit on the recipient and giving the advice could expose the advisor to “electronics advice malpractice” liability.

The car dealership doesn’t bill for the courtesy call about the repair because they can bill for the repair itself.

So when you call the dealership to see if your car is repaired, you would accept them billing you for answering your question? After all, they are working on the same hourly pay structure. If they get pulled away from the car they are working on to answer your question, they could be working on other cars.

That is the reasoning here, right? The law firm answered an email so they should bill someone because they could have been working on another case. That is no different than the car repair scenario.

You wouldn’t accept the dealership billing you for answering your question yet accept the billing by a law firm in similar, if not an identical billing structure.

“How do lawyers get away with this stuff?”

Very simple. The only people who can stop them are other lawyers, who have more incentive to keep the racket going than to put a stop to it. A lawyer once pocketed my $1500 retainer after I told her I wasn’t going to need her services after all. All she had done for me was write one e-mail which couldn’t have taken more than 30 minutes to write. She billed me for reading my complaint letter to her, too, though I didn’t pay it.

There is no way I could get my money back. The bar in her state does not recover retainers from lawyers for work which wasn’t done. Also, if I pursued her in small claims court, she could have the case transferred to a regular court in which my expenses would exceed potential recovery. I shall never trust a lawyer with a retainer again and even on a billable hour basis, as Walzer’s case shows, it isn’t safe to trust them much.

“How do lawyers get away with this stuff?”

Actually, I have a different answer than above. They get away with this stuff, because, in the article and all four pages of comments attached to it, the law firm involved was never named. If you do not name them and shame them, if you do not mention the behavior in a way that another person seeking their services will not find it documented, there is no reason to change behavior at all. Every new client goes in clueless, and suffers the same rapacious billing.

Mention the law firm name, and leave them with the choice of changing the billing behavior, suffering the bad publicity, or dealing with the Streisand effect …

Lots of answers from lawyers on what seems to be a non-legal question. How does a marketplace sustain itself with practices that nauseate the buyers? Easy, 1) monopolize and 2) create the perception of necessity. My only grievance with this editorial is that she didn’t mention the name of the firm in every other sentence.

There’s one response that nobody seems to have thought of: don’t pay. A bill isn’t a court order – it’s a request. She should tell them to stuff it. Let the morons sue her if they really want to collect, and see what a court thinks of charging 12 minutes work for sending an eight word email requiring no legal work whatever that in any case didn’t need to be sent at all.

Last year after I paid an accountant to do my French taxes, I received a charge from the French govt, and called the accountant. She said they were wrong, and I didn’t have to pay, and she had the appropriate paperwork to prove it, but I had to pay her to get a copy of that paperwork. They accepted the paperwork.

Just 30 seconds of work for her to send me an email, and she got 125 euros, but in this case, although I was slightly miffed, she DID have the magic words available, and now I also have them, in case this happens in the future.

The problem here is that the politicians have set up a system where only specialists understand how it works, so that ordinary people with ordinary knowledge cannot manage it, and they are at risk of actual criminal liability, in some cases, for this.

There is an old story that is pertinent here, from the pre-e-mail days. A lawyer was consulted about a pretty significant problem, send a short letter, and the problem was resolved. She sent her client a bill for $500. When the client received it, he wanted a breakdown, since he knew that it had taken no more than a short letter to accomplish the desired result. The lawyer sent the following itemization:

Letter to Thomas Jones – $50
Knowing what to say – $450

M. Sean Fosmire: “I hope everything is OK. Take your time.”

That’ll be $60, please.

The problem with naming the lawyer is that they will most likely sue you for slander, libel, or whatever else they can think of.

Even if you win, you lose, because you still have to pay ANOTHER lawyer to defend you from the first.

Ed’s comment strikes right at the heart of it: the end-game and perceived consequence when you believe yourself to be facing a more powerful adversary. Fortunately I don’t have to deal with attorneys very often. Of the infrequent times that I have, I’ve followed simple rules – determine performance expectations up front, discuss potential risks and consequences, ask about costs in advance, gain commitments, let them see/observe that you write everything down, review the operating agreement from time to time. These are things you do in advance, to make the terms of the relationship clear. Then, as with most things in life, you don’t have to wonder how you got trampled.