You definitely can, most of the times you can’t collect all the hours you put in. Client pays what it pays and the rest is written off. It’s the senior’s job to manage the ratio of billed hours to collected hours.
If you can and want to bill more to a client, you simply review the matter covering more depth or let the work be done by more senior lawyers who have a better hourly rate.
Big-law collects all the client is ready to spend on legal services. The more you spend, the better service you’ll get.
If you suspect foulplay in billables, review the job narratives and raise a complaint.
> You definitely can, most of the times you can’t collect all the hours you put in. Client pays what it pays and the rest is written off. It’s the senior’s job to manage the ratio of billed hours to collected hours.
I am telling you --from experience, not theory-- that many lawyers are resistant to time-saving tools. Not all of them, but many of them. They rarely voice out-loud that their concern is about reduced billables, and will instead make absurd arguments that the time-saving tools decrease quality.
Simple real life example: we were selling a very simple bulk download tool to a law firm. Instead of clicking a link and downloading a document many times, this tool would download many in batch and put them in a zip folder. They raised the objection saying "how do we know it downloaded everything", even though the zip file also had an excel listing all the documents that were downloaded, the source of where they came from, and any errors in downloading them.
If you can and want to bill more to a client, you simply review the matter covering more depth or let the work be done by more senior lawyers who have a better hourly rate.
Big-law collects all the client is ready to spend on legal services. The more you spend, the better service you’ll get. If you suspect foulplay in billables, review the job narratives and raise a complaint.