2024年4月3日-狗急加速器

There have been proposals to shorten the time it takes to get a law school degree, and the grounds for these proposals are usually that law school is very expensive, and law students graduate with a ton of debt and StackSurf.io游戏下载-抖音StackSurf.io游戏中文手机版 v0.1 ...:今天 · StackSurf.io游戏沿途需要在地图当中来收集各种制定的黄色瓷砖，沿途不断的进行加速最终冲向最终的位置，玩起来也是非常类似于跑酷类型，跑的时候要细心的观察一下周围的颜色变化，这些都是能够让人措手不及的，方块的程度推得越高，那么你的分数最终提升的也就越多了。, and meanwhile, a large segment of society is underserved by the legal profession.  So one  solution is to let law students graduate in two years, which presumably would mean that they have 1/3 less debt, and will be willing to practice law at a lower billable rate, serving clients who can't afford an attorney at current rates.  But notice that the law students still will be paying heavily for those two years, and going heavily into debt.

It doesn't take a genius to see that a law school is essentially a group of lecture halls adjacent to a law library.  And you hardly even need the law library anymore, given the fact that legal research is mainly done online today.   Yes, you need law professors who are excellent teachers, but essentially that is a low overhead operation for most subjects, because a law professor can teach a class of 50-100 law students, and most courses do not involve many graded events. 

So if you want to make law school affordable, stop using the law school as a cash cow, and charge less per credit hour.  If you want to help law students financially even more, make it a mandatory part of first year that they qualify for and pass the requirements to have a paralegal certificate at the earliest opportunity.  In other words, a student finishing first year of law school should already have a paralegal certificate as part of the program. Why?  Because insurance companies as a general rule will not pay for law clerk time billed by their panel defense counsel.  It's not billable, period.  Law clerks are no longer hired by insurance defense firms. But paralegal time is billable and paralegals can find work.

Insurance companies in fact wish to have paralegal level work pushed down to paralegals whenever possible.  There are available jobs for paralegals with a paralegal certificate, but many law students have to take multiple unpaid internships during law school to get some experience because there are far fewer law clerk jobs.

From time to time there are articles like this one published in the New York Times last March, attacking the billable hour as the basis for billing clients for services rendered.  Such articles usually have two themes -- that the billable hour results in legal services costing too much, and that the billable hour system is in many ways corrosive to the legal profession.  Alternative billing arrangements are usually held up as the solution that might magically benefit everyone.  However, these are two different issues.  The measures clients impose to control their legal spend are a separate issue from law firms' internal culture.

Insurance defense firms usually are not mentioned in this debate, because we all have been operating under layered cost controls at least since the late 1980's.  These layered cost control measures have long included pre-negotiated and below market billing rates; stringent litigation management guidelines that require pre-authorization for extra staffing, for filing of motions, for depositions, for legal research over a minimal amount, and for other selected activities; detailed litigation plans, which have been a requirement dating back to the 1990's (predating the legal project management fad by at least a decade); detailed budgets organized by standardized ABA uniform task and activity codes; detailed and contemporaneous time records, with each entry coded with the uniform task and activity codes; submission of electronic bills in standard formats, to facilitate automated review and analysis of the bills; routine reviews of bills by claims departments or third party auditing services, resulting in write-offs or write-downs of time considered excessive or not compliant with guidelines; and random audits of sample closed cases, sometimes more than a year after they were concluded.  And yes, after all of that, the insurers are also adopting flat fee or other alternative billing arrangements.

So, with the perspective gained from having practiced under that regime for most of my professional career, I can say with confidence that the billable hour system is not going anywhere.

 The bottom line is that having access to the billing data and the analysis of that data is tremendously valuable to the clients/insurers.  I doubt that it would be possible to negotiate workable alternative fee agreements without having such data to analyze.

 All that billable hour data is necessary in the first place to structure smart alternative fee agreements, and to decide which parts of the services can be “outsourced” to cheaper providers, such as a captive "staff counsel" law firm.  I doubt that any insurer would want to move entirely to flat fee arrangements, for example, and be cut off from that data in its larger markets.

Law firms themselves are also dependent on the billable hour system to measure and control productivity, and have invested in expensive back office computer systems for the collection and analysis of billable hour data.   

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In sum, the adoption of flat fee billing or other alternative billing arrangements is not likely to transform the billable hour culture of law firms.   The billable hour culture is in my view a consequence of the information age, in which it became economically feasible to record activity in six minute increments and then store, aggregate and analyze the data with computers over weeks, months, and years.  As we have seen in professional sports, see Moneyball, the technology is driving the collection and analysis of more data, not less.  

Later:  Here's confirmation from a managing partner interviewed by 绿灯免费版:  "Clients could get more out of their law firms if they fully embraced change and trusted it. For example, we have a client that does a lot of fixed fee work with us. They require almost every project to be a fixed fee, yet we still have to submit detailed time reports that they use to see how they’re doing."  Of course.  The client there not only wants the predictability of the fixed fee, but it also wants the detailed time reports so that it can evaluate the fixed fee deal at its conclusion, use the data to negotiate the next fixed fee deal, and compare how different lawyers and different firms handle similar matters.    That client is actually being very smart.  They know that regardless of all the talk about embracing change, the law firm is going to keep detailed time records anyway, because the law firm needs the data for the same reason the client needs it, as well as for purposes of internal law firm management.  Since the law firm is going to keep detailed time records regardless, the client correctly concludes that there is no good reason not to ask for the detailed time records. 

I do wonder whether, in a flat fee environment, such time records are as meticulously entered and reviewed by law firms as in a normal hourly fee matter.  I would expect that time-keeping practices would get a bit sloppy in a flat fee matter. 

Keeping accurate and properly coded time records is an acquired skill that takes effort.  It's work.  On an hourly fee deal, there is a strong incentive to keep good time -- you want the bill to be paid, and be paid timely.  On a flat fee deal, what is the incentive to keep "good time"?  By "good time", I am not just talking about overstated or understated time  -- which is one possible issue -- but rather descriptive time entries that are properly broken down into discrete tasks with appropriate coding (e.g., no block billing).