The death of the billable hour has been touted before but I believe hourly billing’s days are numbered.  I see attorneys and law firms going to a fixed fee or hybrid model of billing more and more.  It pleases me to see transparency in legal pricing and believe me, it pleases the clients as well.

Those attorneys who are still hanging on for dear life onto the billable hour simply don’t understand what the client wants.  Law firms are a service business.  We are in the business of selling legal advice – not time.  By billing hourly, we are telling the clients that what they’re buying is our time.  But the truth is that every one’s time is the same.  A minute to me is the same as a minute to the client.  If the client truly wanted to buy time, they would either get a personal assistant or a face-lift.

Every practice area is susceptible to flat fee billing.  You could do plain old vanilla flat fee billing (pay once and that’s it) or some hybrid form of flat fee billing to hedge the loss of complex cases.  But to simply say that your practice area doesn’t allow for flat fee pricing is a cop-out.  I do divorce litigation and my entire practice is flat fee.

Abraham Lincoln once said that “A lawyer’s time and advice are his stock and trade.”  That is simply not true anymore.  It’s simpler than that.  Our stock and trade is our advice.