Read an interesting post by Alison Laird last weekend. Interesting as it was, Alison’s post (‘It’s Time’) isn’t the first to call ‘time’ on hourly billing. Nor, in my opinion, will it be the last.

Why do I say this?

Because, as important as the calls for “more for less” and “cost certainty” have been for in-house lawyers and clients more generally, behavioural evidence has shown they’re not really that important to law firms and that clients (in the more general definition of that term) are not willing to push their legal service providers to move away from hourly billing, if – caveat –  they can get a “quote” (read cap or fixed fee expectation).

In short it’s a game. Client says: “we want cost certainty”. Law firm says: “we bill by the hour”. Client says “meet you in the middle – capped/fixed/discounted fees”.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

What if your law firm really wanted to be “entrepreneurial” and decided to think outside the box – starting by changing its definition of “success”?

What if, instead of defining “success” as being the number of hours a year a lawyer works (note not paid for), and/or the amount of revenue the lawyer earns (note not profit), the definition of “success” becomes:

Success is measured in terms of the value received by the customer and the law firm.

I agree, not perfect.

But imperfect as it is, it’s a start. A start of a conversation we need to have as a profession: “How do we measure success?”.

Because until we have this conversation, all other conversations – including that around hourly billing (not pricing) are meaningless.

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