So a lawyer walks into a bar. Is he billing his hours?

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Tilting at windmills - Brief article

"Churn that bill, baby." This is a quote from an email from one lawyer to another at DLA Piper, the world's largest law firm. The email is the latest, and one of the more delicious, examples of how major law firms run up the bill on their clients, whose fee is usually based on something called "billable hours." These are the hours worked mainly by the firm's young associates and billed at four or five times the rate paid the associate. The associate is therefore under pressure to either work fifty hours or more a week in order to report forty actual billable hours, or count part of his billable hours as time spent, say, chatting with pals on Twitter. If these tactics fail to pad the bill enough, unnecessary work will be performed. And this was the subject of the DLA Piper memo that was recently unearthed by Peter...