You ever wonder why lawyers bill like they do (e.g., by the hour, by the phone call, etc) and are reluctant to give away free advice, even to friends? I've spent a lot of time agonizing over billing practices, contemplating billable time, and attending seminars on billing ethics (well, two). I've even talked with two priests who used to be lawyers. Let me try to explain legal advice by analogy. (If this bores you, skip to the black line below.)
Consider yourself a bar owner. You make the bulk of your money (60%) off drink sales, a chunk off food sales, and a small amount from miscellaneous stuff (a pinball machine and juke box). Now say a friend comes into the bar and asks for a free drink. He's asking for a tiny piece of your biggest source of revenue. One drink isn't a big deal, but it can add up.
The drinks are the advice. Lawyers make most of their money off advice. There are other revenue streams--drafting documents, court appearances if you're a litigator, research--but the bulk of revenue comes from advice. If we give it away, we're crippling revenue.
But to make the analogy complete, you have to picture your bar as very small. Say it holds only ten people. When all ten stools are full, you can make a good living. Now the buddy comes in and takes the first available stool. It's crisis time. If you let him stay and give him drinks, you're losing sales: free drinks to him, losing drink sales to a patron that would've taken the tenth stool. You'll still make money off the other patrons, but this buddy represents a very real and tangible loss of profits: you lose money that day and you lose money from frustrated potential patrons who don't come back tomorrow.
That's almost exactly (no analogy is perfect) how it is for a busy lawyer. The ten stools are the ten hours in a working day. If the lawyer is busy--if all ten bar stools are full or potentially full with patrons; if the work day is full or nearly full of client work--do not ask him for free advice. It's simply bogue. Come back when he's not busy. The ten stools won't always be full. I have a very busy practice, but bar stools open up a couple of times every month. On many days, the stools are full, but if a few are vacant, I'm happy to help a friend at a reduced or no-fee basis. But if the stools are full, I'm liable to snarl at the friend who would, literally, take money away from my family.
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Great quote from that Steyn article I linked to yesterday:
A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what's left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.
And another:
Most of us have prejudices: we may not like ballet or golf, but we don't have to worry about going to the deli and ordering a ham on rye while some ninny in tights prances around us or a fellow in plus-fours tries to chip it out of the rough behind the salad bar. Yet, in the course of a day, any number of non-rock-related transactions are accompanied by rock music. I was at the airport last week, sitting at the gate, and over the transom some woman was singing about having two lovers and being very happy about it. And we all sat there as if it's perfectly routine. To the pre-Bloom generation, it's very weird–though, as he notes, “It may well be that a society's greatest madness seems normal to itself.”
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Why I'll end up voting Republican in 2008, no matter how frustrated I've grown with the Republicans: The House on Wednesday approved the first federal ban on job discrimination against gays, lesbians and bisexuals.
This type of legislation creates a real strain on employers. Until you've worked with discrimination issues, you have no idea what a Pandora's box of problems it creates. This one will be even worse: "Who is gay? Is one encounter in the past ten years enough?"
Also: Is there no exemption for a small employer? Does a small office with, say, only two workers have to hire a homosexual? If you've ever worked in a small office, you understand the intense discomfort that could result from such a thing (of course, workplace discomfort is one of the things the bill's supporters want; they take humorous and vengeful delight in such things, cocksure they're on the progressive cutting edge and blazing a trail against bigotry).
And these are just the prudential concerns. I won't even go into religion, morality, and the freedom of association (which is hand-down the most trampled freedom in American today).
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$25,000 dessert: Stephen Bruce, owner of Serendipity 3 in Manhattan's Upper East side, unveiled the £12,500 pudding called the Frrrozen Haute Chocolate.
