Greg Lambert, Chief Knowledge Service Officer at Jackson Walker and well-known blogger at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, recently authored a post entitled The Ethics of It All. In it he talked about another article by Fast Company’s Gwen Moran entitled, Is It Unethical to Not Tell My Employer I’ve Automated My Job?. Moran offers the hypothetical of a worker who figures out how to automate a 40 hour a week job into 2 hours and then wonders whether she should tell her the employer knowing that it could cause her to lose her job. Lambert raises a similar ethical question for the legal profession, particularly for those who charge by the hour versus results.
Moran’s hypo gets precisely at the acute dilemma posed by the billable hour model: reducing time and creating efficiency is the fastest way to lower revenue. And like Moran’s hypothetical worker, a law firm that does that too much for too long risks financial ruin. Certainly for an associate and to some partners in law firms, finding a way to automate work reduces billable hours and could be professional suicide.
We have all heard as practicing lawyers about that lawyer who refuses to negotiate or drags things out until he or she gets their billable hour quota in.
In a way, its similar to another paradox of the legal profession: if we resolve a matter quickly, our reward is less work, less billable hours, and less revenue. The argument, of course, is by doing good work efficiently, your reward is supposedly more work in the future from a happy client. But how many lawyers these days really want to play that kind of long game? And if the matter is one that won’t likely repeat itself, how strong is the incentive to resolve
