flat fees

The More Things Change, the More Hourly Billing Will Stay the Same

August 4, 2010

Tuning in to the live tweets last week from the opening of the Association of Continuing Legal Education conference in New York City (it may sound dull, but they are a hard partying group!), there was much talk at the plenary session about the allegedly irrevocable changes occurring in the legal profession because of the [...]

Read the full article →

Webinar: Alt. Billing, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Lawyering

July 22, 2010

At 12:00 pm CDT tomorrow, that is, Friday, July 23rd, 2010, we will be re-playing our epically-titled webinar on alternative billing and fee arrangements: My law firm has evolved from a mostly-hourly-billing practice five years ago to a no-hourly-billing practice today. We use flat fees and a subscription model, as well as unbundled services and [...]

Read the full article →

The Downsides of Hourly Billing

May 3, 2010

I may not work at a big firm, but the concept of “hitting your billable hours” is well-known to law students, lawyers, and fans of John Grisham novels. Smaller firms and solo practitioners might not have a threshold number, but they still know how many hours they need to bill to stay in the black. [...]

Read the full article →

Confessions of a Happy Lawyer

March 18, 2010

True confession: I’m a happy lawyer. I know, I know, those are hard to find. Admittedly, it wasn’t always this way. I spent my first five years in practice struggling financially under the weight of the broken hourly-fee billing model inherited from our forefathers. As a result, I was broke, frustrated and on the verge [...]

Read the full article →

Matt Homann: Tips for the Suddenly Solo and New Law Firm Associates

August 12, 2009

Matt Homann’s blog, the [non]billable hour indirectly inspired my own approach to flat fees and value billing. He was one of the keynote speakers at Minnesota CLE’s “Strategic Solutions for Solo and Small Firms” conference in Duluth this week. Yesterday, he sat down with me to share some tips for the “suddenly solo”—attorneys who get [...]

Read the full article →

Watch out for ethics bumps in flat fees

November 10, 2008

As alternative billing approaches go, flat fees have many fans. Clients like to know exactly what a particular legal service will cost and lawyers like to leverage experience they have gained in providing the same service to others. Sometimes a flat fee even lets a lawyer spend more time on a matter because there’s no [...]

Read the full article →