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The Last Days of the Philadelphia Lawyer
By Tom McGrath
D’Amore says there’s no question the level of discontent among lawyers is higher than ever. The problem faced by lawyers of a certain age is that it’s too late to drop out and start over at something else. “Most don’t do anything,” D’Amore says. “They suck it up.”
Maybe not surprisingly, the move to reform the profession is coming not from the top, but from the bottom — indeed, from people who aren’t even lawyers yet. Last year a group of students at Stanford launched an organization — it now has members at prominent law schools around the country, and this month is coming to Penn — called “Law Students Building a Better Legal Profession.”
“We see increasing billable hour requirements, decreasing professionalism, and a more dominant focus on the bottom line,” the manifesto on their website declares. “Law firms are jeopardizing the roots of the profession in assiduous service to our clients, community service, and justice. The time has come for change.” (Barack Obama, call your lawyer.)
Among the changes the students call for, the most notable is replacing the billable-hour model with transactional billing — in essence, charging clients for the work performed, not the time it takes to do it. Maybe even more significant, though, is that the organization has crafted its own rankings — a new generation’s answer to Steve Brill’s Am Law 100. It ranks firms not on profits, but on their culture and ability to provide work/life balance for attorneys. (For now, these rankings only focus on firms in a few cities; Philly isn’t among them.)
It’s too soon to tell whether the nascent movement will make a big difference — though the issue of work/life balance is something that managing partners at Philadelphia firms say they’re going to have no choice but to address. (Their general assessment of young lawyers is that they want to work less but get paid the same.) That said, no one currently in charge sees the billable hour going anyplace soon. “There has been talk for 30 years about alternatives to the hourly rate,” says Brad Hildebrandt, founder and chairman of the country’s largest law-firm consulting business. The biggest obstacle? Clients, who want to know what they’re paying for.
Maybe not surprisingly, the move to reform the profession is coming not from the top, but from the bottom — indeed, from people who aren’t even lawyers yet. Last year a group of students at Stanford launched an organization — it now has members at prominent law schools around the country, and this month is coming to Penn — called “Law Students Building a Better Legal Profession.”
“We see increasing billable hour requirements, decreasing professionalism, and a more dominant focus on the bottom line,” the manifesto on their website declares. “Law firms are jeopardizing the roots of the profession in assiduous service to our clients, community service, and justice. The time has come for change.” (Barack Obama, call your lawyer.)
Among the changes the students call for, the most notable is replacing the billable-hour model with transactional billing — in essence, charging clients for the work performed, not the time it takes to do it. Maybe even more significant, though, is that the organization has crafted its own rankings — a new generation’s answer to Steve Brill’s Am Law 100. It ranks firms not on profits, but on their culture and ability to provide work/life balance for attorneys. (For now, these rankings only focus on firms in a few cities; Philly isn’t among them.)
It’s too soon to tell whether the nascent movement will make a big difference — though the issue of work/life balance is something that managing partners at Philadelphia firms say they’re going to have no choice but to address. (Their general assessment of young lawyers is that they want to work less but get paid the same.) That said, no one currently in charge sees the billable hour going anyplace soon. “There has been talk for 30 years about alternatives to the hourly rate,” says Brad Hildebrandt, founder and chairman of the country’s largest law-firm consulting business. The biggest obstacle? Clients, who want to know what they’re paying for.
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