Quote:
Originally Posted by Dottore
Leverage is how most partners in big firms make their money. In fact most large firms will not make you a partner unless you have proven that you can leverage your practice—the higher the better.
But what happens then when, say, a couple of your key clients have no work for you, or god-forbid, cross the road to the competition? Suddenly your six or seven highly paid associates don't have enough to do, so they start spinning their tires on the files that they do have, because they know that their bonuses are dependent on the billable hours they collect, and you encourage them in this because your profit share is dependent upon the collections of your associates.
I think if the average client knew just how inherently conflicted and dishonest the billing process in large law firms is, they'd have a coronary.
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A lot of that is true. You do not have a future at a big firm if you can't develop a book of business, you won't be made partner.
And it is very difficult to develop that book. At big firms these days, partners bill at $500+ per hour, and even the most junior associates must be at $250/hour now.
Imagine how difficult it would be to find clients capable of paying those amounts. We are talking about monthly bills of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. You have to do this indefinitely. That is a tremendous amount of pressure.
It is very easy to lose those big clients, too. If your contact person moves to another company, you may lose the client. If the client is bought out or merged into another company, you almost always lose them.
Lawyers at big firms do sometimes churn bills, and that's a lot of stress on the rainmaking partner, too. How do you send out, and collect, a bill for $80,000 that is nothing but a bunch of make-work time billed by $350/hr associates? You can't, b/c you'll lose the client. (Most big clients have in house counsel or accounting which reviews the bills - you can't charge for nothing). It is a tremendous amount of stress.
It's funny how many kids go to law school because they "are good debaters" or "good arguers," when that has almost nothing to do with the real business of law. That's why there is such a high dissatisfaction rate among lawyers. They don't make the money they thought they were going to make, and they didn't realize that it is first a foremost a sales business. And a very cutthroat one, at that.