[blindlaw] Billable hours and reasonable accommodation

Wed Jul 18 02:36:30 UTC 2012

Ross:

Regarding the state of our economy and the number of lawyers flooding the
market, I offer the article below.  Also, if anyone is paying attention to
the European Union and the recent LIBOR scandal, do not look forward to any
economic recovery for the next decade, or two.

NY Times, Sunday, July 15, 2012
An Existential Crisis For Law Schools

July is the cruelest month for recent law school graduates. State bar exams
next week are make-or-break affairs, determining how many will be allowed to
practice law. Those exams once set a graduate on the path to a lifelong
career. Not anymore. A huge number of new graduates, if lucky enough to find
work, will not be employed in legal jobs that require passing the bar. 
Only 55 percent of 43,735 graduates in 2011 had a law-related job nine
months after graduation, said William Henderson of the Indiana University
Maurer School of Law, who analyzed recent data from the American Bar
Association. Twenty-eight percent were unemployed or underemployed. And at
the 20 law schools with the highest employment, 83 percent of graduates were
working as lawyers. At the bottom 20, it was a dismal 31 percent. 

These numbers are far worse than jobs data going back a generation and
should be a deep embarrassment to law schools, which have been churning out
more graduates than the economy can employ, indulging themselves in copious
revenues that higher tuitions and bigger classes bring in. A growing list of
deans acknowledge that legal education is facing an existential crisis, but
the transformation to a more sustainable model will be difficult and messy. 

The number of law office jobs began to decline in 2004, well before the
recession. And demand for new lawyers isn't expected to grow much even when
the economy recovers. Outsourcing of legal work to places like India and
greater efficiencies made possible by smarter software to search documents
for evidence, for example, are allowing firms to cut the positions of
multitudes of low-end lawyers. In 2009, twice as many people passed bar
exams as there were legal openings - a level of oversupply that may hold up
for years. There is, of course, tremendous need for lawyers to serve the
poor and middle class, but scant dollars to pay them. 

Law schools have hustled to compensate for these shifts by trying to make it
look as if their graduates are more marketable, even hiring them as research
assistants to offer temporary employment. But those strategies won't fix
legal education, particularly when students are starting to see that a
high-priced degree, financed by mountains of loans, may never pay off. The
number of people taking law school admissions tests fell 24 percent in the
last two years, to the lowest level in a decade. Law schools will be crushed
if they don't remake themselves, said Frank Wu, dean of Hastings College of
the Law at the University of California in San Francisco. "This is Detroit
in the 1970s: change or die." 

Hastings, for example, is reducing the number of its J.D. students by 20
percent in the next three years. It trimmed staff jobs to cut costs, and it
increased the teaching load of each faculty member by 20 percent to reduce
the need for adjunct professors, among other reasons. But Mr. Wu says the
school has no plans to cut the size of its full-time faculty or its
compensation or tuition - and tuition is an unavoidable problem. 

Brian Tamanaha reports in "Failing Law Schools" that in-state annual tuition
at public law schools rose to an average of $18,472 in 2009 from $2,006 in
1985, and tuition at private law schools increased to $35,743 from $7,526. 

A lot of money went to raising faculty salaries. With salary and summer pay,
the average now is likely close to $170,000 - and some law professors make
$350,000 or more. 

As tuition has soared, so has student debt. Nearly 9 out of 10 graduates
have sizable debt, with $98,500 the average for the class of 2010, or about
$1,200 a month in loan payments over 10 years. Most schools and many
students have banked on students' being able to pay back enormous loans with
ample salaries, but that flawed model is irretrievably broken. 

It will be hard for any school to alter its cost structure without making
substantial changes to its faculty and pay, though some schools are
earnestly considering two-year J.D. programs and beginning to experiment
with more virtual learning in selected courses. Course-sharing among law
schools in lecture courses is another cost-saving option. 

But in some ways the crisis of law schools goes well beyond the
unsustainable economics. Their missions have become muddled, with a widening
gap between their lofty claims about the profession's civic responsibility
and their failure to train lawyers for public service or provide them with
sufficient preparation for practical work. 

Some schools are trying to break out of this dead end. Boston's Suffolk
University Law School is planning to focus on the justice gap by preparing
more students to serve the middle class and poor. At Washington and Lee
School of Law in Virginia, the third year is now devoted to practical
training. Others have increased courses in negotiation, counseling and other
skills. The A.B.A., which accredits law schools, could help by allowing much
more experimentation and differentiation among schools - and by being much
more skeptical of diploma mills. 

This crisis makes it easy to forget that the law attracts pragmatic types,
able to handle changed circumstances. And in fact, huge law firms, hot areas
of practice and outsized salaries at top firms are fairly recent
developments. Law schools need to be pragmatic, too, finding ways to ensure
that graduates can afford to take jobs where the salary is less important
than the impact.

-----Original Message-----
From: blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Ross Doerr
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2012 1:02 PM
To: 'Blind Law Mailing List'
Subject: Re: [blindlaw] Billable hours and reasonable accommodation

Hi Josh:
I couldn't agree more.  When I made the determination of what the case is
worth, I always did it from the viewpoint of the client, and billed fairly,
or what I thought was fair, from that point on. That almost always involved
a decrease in the bill, and the client did not miss seeing that.
You can't buy that kind of good will for a practice. 
Like you, it almost always took me longer to go through things than a
sighted attorney would take owing to blindness, but whether you are
well-versed in that particular field of law, or are just getting started in
it, ethics opinions come down on the side of spending what ever time is
necessary to properly represent ;your client. Hence my fallback of billing
according to what the case is worth in my area, and what the client's real
world means are. A $500 case here would almost certainly be billed out much
higher in a place like Boston, Phoenix Los Angeles or San Francisco. Maine
rates #50  in recovery from this economic depression, and our population is
decreasing as those with good educations flee to areas where jobs are more
plentiful and pay rates are higher. What that really means is that the pool
of business clients or private clients is getting smaller while the number
of attorneys remains the same. The level of employment is just so low that
pay and billing must react to stay open.  
For example, I've been amazed at how many members of the medical profession
are closing up their practices here and going down to Texas. The
availability of medical care is sufferring for it.
I'm sure Texas is a wonderful place, but having seen the heat temperatures
down there lately, I think I'll stick to the ice and snow up here for a
while yet.
  Ross

-----Original Message-----
From: blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of joshjsmith at charter.net
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2012 1:18 PM
To: Blind Law Mailing List
Cc: Blind Law Mailing List
Subject: Re: [blindlaw] Billable hours and reasonable accommodation

I do tend to write down my bills.  Probably because I don't want to over
bill for the area but also because I realize it does take me longer to read
through thick files and I don't want to pass that cost on to my clients.  I
will say that many clients to understand that it takes me longer and I have
even had some tell me to bill for whatever time I spend on their case.  I
still write some time off however.

On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 2:35 PM, Gerard Sadlier wrote:

> as a trainee we are told to account for all the time we work.
> Most of that will be written off, not just for me but for everyonE.
> This is a good question.
> Do you find yourselves working longer hours as blind lawyers?
> Ger
>
> On 7/15/12, Farber, Randy <rfarber at jw.com> wrote:
>> Elizabeth -
>>
>> 	When  it comes to billables, there are two places that the 
>> statistics are important.  First, they show-up on the invoice to your 
>> client.  I always review the invoices and bill based on what I 
>> believe is competitive.
>> Therefore, I often write off some of the time I bill.  Not because I 
>> am blind, but because I do not believe that the invoice is 
>> competitive in the market.
>>
>> 		The second place where billables are important is in your 
>> compensation as an associate (as opposed to a partner where it is the 
>> cash that is important).  My recommendation is to write down all the 
>> hours you work, and let the billing attorney decide what should be 
>> billed.  If you are solo or in a small firm, you may be both the 
>> working attorney and the billing attorney.  In which case, I still 
>> have the same advise.  You will want to be able to keep track of how 
>> many hours you are spending on a task, even if you are not billing 
>> the entire time.
>>
>> Feel free to contact me off list if you would like to discuss this 
>> issue in a lawfirm setting.
>>
>> Randy
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org
>> [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Elizabeth Rene
>> Sent: Saturday, July 14, 2012 5:29 PM
>> To: blindlaw at nfbnet.org
>> Subject: [blindlaw] Billable hours and reasonable accommodation
>>
>> I am very impressed to read that several lawyers on this list are 
>> working for private firms.  I have always worked in the public 
>> sector.  Could you please tell me your experience of logging billable 
>> hours for your firms?
>> While consistently productive, I have always taken a bit longer to do 
>> research and write briefs than my sighted colleagues (time and a 
>> half, at least(, but maybe some new technology would improve that.
>> How have your firms rated the productivity of blind lawyers, and 
>> how--generally--are blind lawyers in the private sector calculating 
>> their billable hours if they take longer than sighted colleagues to 
>> do specific tasks?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Elizabeth Rene
>>
>>
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>
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