Michael Cook confronts the ghost of hourly billing
Adam Sampson, the Legal Ombudsman, wrote in The Guardian that for too long lawyers have got away with “arcane pricing and billing practices” (“Lawyers beware: your clients are rebelling”, 6 March 2012). He continued: “Protected by their social status, political power and deliberately obfuscatory language, lawyers have hitherto been able to ignore the notion of customer service…Nowhere is the battle between the traditional view of client and customer more marked than in the notion of pricing…Law firms who seem incapable of working on a fixed costs model for individual clients appear far more willing to do so for insurers and the Legal Services Commission.”
According to the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, addressing the Association of Costs Lawyers on 11 May: “Hourly billing at best leads to inefficient practices, at worst it rewards and incentivises inefficiency. Moreover, it undermines effective competition in the provision of legal services, as it ‘penalises...well run legal business whose systems and processes enable it to conclude matters rapidly’ (Richard Susskind).
