Keeping Time

• Author: Danielle Bra?
• Pages: 35-36

MARCH 2018 ABA JOURNAL || 35

Business of Law

Further, some companies wil l

need a data-protection ocer,

business-level leadership that

oversees GDPR compliance.

Others will re quire new technol-

ogy, which will cost some Fort une

500 companies up to $1 million,

according to a repor t by the law

firm Paul Hastings. Failur e to

comply could be devastating—

a company could be fined up

to 4 percent of its global annual

revenue.

To understand the potential

impact, consider the 2014 and

2015 hacks on Hilton Worldwide,

which exposed the cred it-card

information of 350,000-plus

customers. Because of t he breach,

New York Attorney General

Eric Schneiderman fined it

$700,000—about $2 per record.

In 2015, the hotel chain reported

$11.2 billion in revenue worldwide.

Under the GDPR, the fine for the

same breach could be as much

as $448 million, or $1,280 per

record.

As companies race t oward

compliance, data-protec tion

authorities are ramping up.

In late 2016, many of Germany’s

state-level ocials sent su rveys

to 500 companies to collect

information about internationa l

data-transfer prac tices. In

December 2017, French regulators

threatened to sanc tion WhatsApp

for its data-shari ng agreement

with Facebook. A nd U.K. aut hori-

ties launched an investigat ion into

Uber after it was r eported that

the company covered up a 2016

breach that aect ed 57 million

people. This all primes t he pump

for May 25.

As far as what to e xpect from

authorities then, Moerel at MoFo

says regulators could t ake var-

ious directions. And re gardless

of direction, expe ct them to act

forcefully. “The data-prote ction

authorities will nee d to make a

statement,” she says. Q

Keeping Time

New tools that help lawyers track billable hours

have re-ignited a debate: Should lawyers move

toward nonhourly fee arrangements?

By Danielle Bra

BILLABLE HOURS ARE A THING OF THE PAST FOR

JUSTIN LOVELY. IT TURNS OUT THE bil lable-hours system

cost him a lot of valuable time.

“Having to manually input the ti me for a specific task and

then compiling and review ing at the end of the month took too much

time,” says Lovely, a personal injury and DUI at torney in Myrtle Beach,

South Carolina. “Also,

double-checking to see

if the billing was cor rect

or if an attorney or sta 

member failed to bill

for work performed just

simply takes time.”

It took 30 minutes

to an hour per file when

Lovely took into account

drafting the bil l and asso-

ciated letters. So for t he

majority of his clients, he

moved to a flat fee and

contingency f ee structure.

However, new software

and cloud-based servic es

have made it much easier

for lawyers to keep trac k

of billable hours. For

example, Ping, which

has won awards for its

billable-hour s innovation,

works in the background

and allows users to automat ically track and bill their hours, whi le

Amazon’s Alexa track s time through voice commands. And other tools

are providing attor neys with various methods to tra ck their time faster

and easier if they choose to c ontinue doing it .

Yet big companies such as Microsoft recently an nounced they will no

longer bill outside lawyers by the hour, pushing the field to a crossroad s:

Grab hold of the new technology and continue wit h billable hours or

move onto another fee structur e.

A DIFFERENT MODEL

The traditional billable model is broken, says at torney C. Stinson

Mundy, founder of Linden Legal Strategies in R ichmond, Virginia.

Mundy used the billable-hours model when she was at her previous

Law

Practice

PHOTOGRAPH BY GENE HO

Justin Lovely