Compounding all this is the slight absurdity of assuming that you can capture attorney work in such exacting time increments. If you wake up in the middle of the night and think for a few minutes about what to do on a case, that’s legitimate work, but no attorney ever bills for “woke up in middle of night and decided to make a motion for X.” Nor do I know of any attorneys who make sure to subract the three seconds they had a fleeting thought about where to eat lunch while working on a motion that’s taking them all day.

Lots of lawyer and billing abuses out there, sure, but I don’t see the nickel-and-dime splicing here as among the worst.

0.1 of billable time represents one-tenth of an hour, or six minutes. So, what you say is that if an attorney works 0.1 plus a second (six minutes and a fraction) he/she bills for 0.2 hours or twelve minutes? It’s fairer this way: if an attorney works less than three minutes on a task he/she bills 0.0 and notes the time accordingly; if he works from three to just under six minutes the time is legitimately 0.1; six to eight and a fraction (round down) is also 0.1 but nine to twelve is 0.2—so on average every minute is billed fairly to the client. So on and so forth.

What you propose is that for every six minutes plus one second the attorney bills 0.2 (twelve minutes.) Not fair. That means, on average for every nine minutes (half point between six and twelve minutes) of work the attorney bills twelve minutes (0.2) of time. At $200/hr that’s averaging $10 overbilling for each hour. Hey kids, can you say “class action?” I knew you could!

These shenanigans lead to billing 0.1 or 0.2 ($20 or $40, thank you insurance defense attorneys, and others) for leaving a voice message or whatnot. That’s B.S.

Does the American Bar Association have an ethics opinion on this? I’d like to know. But, I reason that if any other profession would on average bill twelve minutes for nine minutes of work would get sued at the drop of a hat.

I can’t entirely agree with your billing analysis, though, “12 minutes to review the file, formulate your thoughts, leave the message, and memo the same.”

What? 12 minutes to review a file that I already paid the attorney to know in the first place? Formulate your thoughts? Come on, now.

Now, maybe in some instances this may be reasonable if the litigation is sufficiently complex, but having been on the receiving end of such voicemails and later bills I know darn well what was and was not involved in leaving a message and it does not take 12 minutes.

So while I understand that defense attorneys don’t escape your criticism (and the criticism that tort reform, if strong, would cut into their business, too), AND conceding that the billable hours system has its problems, calling insurance defenders “highway robbers” is way off. Even a white-shoe firm charging in the $400s for a direct-representation products liability case, it should be noted, didn’t START the lawsuit.

Several tied at 24 hours.

One enterpresing associate booked a flight to California, worked in the office, the cab, in the airport and on the flight, and due to the time change billed 27 hours in one day.

I think billing fraud is probably rampant at the big name firms, and corporate America goes along to get the brains and names.