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The Boston Business Journal ran a nice profile on our firm, Shepherd, and how we got rid of the billable hour three years ago. Lisa van der Pool, the BBJ's top-notch legal-beat reporter, did the interview and wrote the story. The piece is called "Rebel with a clause: Lawyer is fixed on reforming the billable hour."
Lisa describes how we changed our business model:
For the first eight years of running ... Shepherd Law Group, Shepherd billed clients by the hour. But soon after starting the firm he began to research everything about the billable hour, including how long it had been in use and whether a fixed-pricing model could even work....
His next step was to analyze eight years worth of bills from his firm, to figure out what was driving costs. Did his clients feel like they got their money’s worth and did his firm feel like they got paid fairly? He had read that you can’t do litigation on a fixed-fee basis, and 80 percent of his firm’s work is litigation.
“Now, after doing it for three years, I’m here to tell you, you can do litigation on fixed fees. It all comes down to, what is the service ... worth to the client?”
If there's a money quote in the article, it's probably this one, talking about how lawyers see themselves as being something more than other businesspeople:
“We’re so resistant as a group to thinking of ourselves as a business. But we are a business. We’re not a priesthood. It’s not a guild.”
Read the entire piece here. (Note: the article continues onto a second page. The next-page link is tucked in after some sponsored links.)