Fees and Billing Practices Subcommittee
| Publication year | 1993 |
| Pages | 252 |
| Citation | Vol. 22 No. 2 Pg. 252 |
1993, February, Pg. 252. Fees and Billing Practices Subcommittee
The CBA Fees and Billing Practices Subcommittee was directed by the CBA Task Force on Professionalism to conduct an investigation of the billable hour as a billing system and the ramifications of other billing approaches. The inherent conflict of interest between the client and attorney about fees was to be of special interest. Also, the Subcommittee was directed to consider the offering of services and products that compete with law firms, as well as the sharing of ownership of law firms with non-lawyers.(fn1) The Subcommittee decided it was uninterested in the matters of competition and joint ownership and removed them from the assignment.
The focus of the Subcommittee has converged upon several related issues. The Subcommittee considered the history of the billable hour, the good reasons for which it was originally adopted, and the bad effects which have developed over time. In addition, one of the Subcommittee members reported on the effects of new technology on billing practices and the costs of the sophisticated machinery that is now available, as well as cost accounting for staff assistants and other items of overhead.
With the help of a judicial member of the Subcommittee, Leonard Plank, and another member, Marcia Krieger, who has expertise in the bankruptcy court, a study was made of the setting or approval of attorneys' fees by the various courts. Following along that trend, another Subcommittee member gave an oral summary of the billing practices of various corporate entities.
An interesting area of inquiry was the effect of the sophistication of clients upon the setting of fees in the current economic situation. The Subcommittee was furnished information about putting cases out for bid, budgeting, auditing of attorneys' fees and flat fees. In this query it was aided by the addition to the Subcommittee of an attorney employed by a major Colorado corporation who is, in effect, a consumer of legal services.
Many of the sources of information indicated that the public has some perception that the person at fault ought to be paying the price of litigation. Therefore, the Subcommittee investigated the practices in other common law countries, the effects of Rule 11 and statutes which require...
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