Although hourly rates charged by many lawyers may seem excessive, rates are less important to your overall legal expenses than how firms charge their time. For example, minimum billing increments of quarter-hours can lead to significantly higher bills than tenth of an hour increments (Brandt v. Astrue, 2009).
But beyond billing rates are many other improper billing practices that violate solicitor-client contractual agreements, ignore accepted ethical standards, and suffer from manual or duplicative billing errors. Common examples include:
- Charging clients for firm overhead.
- Pyramiding (i.e., charging for clerical work at lawyer rates).
- Changing hourly rates without prior approval.
- Changing staffing for the convenience of the law firm without prior approval.
- Billing for time spent creating or reviewing bills.
- Using multiple lawyers to accomplish work of a single lawyer.
- Recycling work product and charging as if the work was newly created.
- Billing for time used to train new lawyers.
- Attending a court hearing, conference or deposition with a large “support” group.
- Billing improbably long days.
- Billing in large “blocks” of time, masking the amount of time required for each individual task.
- Billing in large “minimum” time segments, such as 15 minutes for leaving a voicemail.
Our bill audits routinely discover frequent and sizable patterns of improper charges for our clients. The results of two audits are summarized below. See our approach page to find out about the Sterling Solution for reducing legal costs.
| Case Study 1 |
Large Regional Bank
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| Case Study 2 |
Law Firm Billings |
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