Dare To Dream

I found this interesting article in the New York Times by Lisa Belkin stating that firms are starting to soften on billable requirements. I haven't seen it yet, but I hope she's right and a new work philosophy is emerging.

... lawyers are overworked, depressed and leaving.

...So far the change — which includes taking fresh looks at the billable hour, schedules and partnership tracks — is mostly at the smaller firms. But even some of the larger, more hidebound employers are taking notice.

“There are things happening everywhere, enough to call it a movement,” said Deborah Epstein Henry, who founded Flex-Time Lawyers,... “The firms don’t think of it as a movement, because it is happening in isolation, one firm at a time. But if you step back and see the whole puzzle, there is definitely real change.”

Last month, Ms. Henry’s ambitious proposal was published in the magazine Diversity and the Bar. Her plan, called FACTS, takes on law-firm bedrock — billable hours, which are how lawyers have calculated their fees for more than 50 years.

At nearly every large American firm, lawyers must meet a quota of hours. During the ’60s and ’70s, the requirement was between 1,600 and 1,800 hours a year or about 34 hours a week, not counting time for the restroom or lunch or water cooler breaks. Today that has risen to 2,000 to 2,200 hours, or roughly 42 hours a week. (Billing 40 hours a week means putting in upward of 60 at the office.)

FACTS is an acronym. Under Ms. Henry’s proposal, work time can be: Fixed (allowing lawyers to choose less high-profile work for more predictable schedules), or Annualized (intense bursts of high-adrenaline work followed by relative lulls); Core (with blocks mapped out for work and for commitments like meeting children at the bus); Targeted (an agreed-upon goal of hours, set annually, customized for each worker, with compensation adjusted accordingly); and Shared (exactly as it sounds).

Ms. Henry’s proposal came at the end of last year, when firms had already started backing away from the billable hour. Some have gone so far as to eliminate it. The Rosen law firm in Raleigh, N.C., ...did so this year, instead charging clients a flat fee.

Similarly, Dreier, a firm with offices in New York and Los Angeles, now pays its lawyers salaries and bonuses based on revenue generation, not hours billed.

...A group of students at Stanford Law School, ...shook up the legal world in 2006 when they formed Law Students Building a Better Legal Profession. The Stanford group has more than 130 members, and other elite schools like Yale and New York University have formed chapters. The Stanford organization has published a ranking of firms based on how they treat employees; members vow not to work for those who don’t rate well...