Rees Morrison has consulted to more than 250 law departments (and several law firms) over 22 years to help them better manage themselves and their outside counsel. For more, visit reesmorrison.com, email me, or call 973.568.9110.

All posts (C) 2005-9 Rees W. Morrison.
If you would like a Metapost Plus: please email me with the name and I will send it.

Archive by Month

Archive by Category

Technorati Profile Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

« Internal (or infernal) tracking of time | Main | Contract negotiation guides as distinct from contract templates »

The debate on whether to track and charge-back time to clients

I oppose tracking time in legal departments at the level of detail found in law firms (See my post of Nov. 22, 2008: internal time tracking.).

Even more I question the value of charging clients for the hours worked by inside-counsel (See my post of June 30, 2006: don’t charge back time; May 14, 2006: multiple rates; May 31, 2006: Pandora’s box; Nov. 13, 2006: three ways to encourage clients to still use internal lawyers; Nov. 20, 2006: embed costs of lawyers in business unit budgets; May 16, 2006: chargebacks to clients; and Jan. 27, 2008: selectively charge for time servicing clients.).

I know that hours can be gummed up, but mostly that allocation systems accomplish the same goal – sharing the costs of a company-wide resource and some market discipline on the use of in-house talent – without the administrative load.

Posted on November 22, 2008 at 09:15 PM in Clients | Permalink

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Post a comment