efficiency, do they? If they bill by the hour, then why on earth would they do a job for a client in 50 hours that they could credibly stretch out to 200 hours? Am I missing something?

I think that's the point of the retired partner's comments noted in the Shulevitz post. The "problem" would be easy to fix would that it were just so simple.

Like the administrative burden of "task-code" billing, "by the task" rather than block billing, and requirements for detailed work descriptions (and with some clients that refuse to pay for such frivolities as "research" and "conferences" with counsel), the billable hour itself is driven by clients' (corporate clients in particular) demands that their outside lawyers demonstrate or justify the cost of the services they provide. At the end of the day, though, this is so much late 20th century bogus quantification that winds up creating substantially more administrative overhead than it yields in terms of actual beneficial analysis. The time lawyers spend writing billing descriptions (and their in-house counterparts reading them) always struck me as nothing short of silly -- after all, in-house counsel, do you think that time in drafting these descriptions is really "free" when certain tasks might get "rounded up" to capture this work done on your behalf? I digress.

There's a larger issue for the profession as a whole over the incredible disconnect of incentives with the billable hour system. The client wants the task done right, on time, for as little cost as possible. The attorney's incentive (sorry to those idealists in the bar associations - we are no less economic beings than any other human) is to drag out a task for as long as possible. Because the attorney controls the information (how much a task actually took to perform), the attorney always wins in these transactions. Unless every state bar acts to ban the practice, it's going to be hard for supposedly "more humane" law firms to do away with hourly billing, as other firms will "compete" by offering the current system to potential clients as a marketing gimmick.

Lastly, I find it sort of backhandedly sexist that the issue of billable hours and work life balances in general is discussed as a "women's" issue. Regardless of whether male attorneys would devote their additional free time in a billable hour free world to child rearing, caring for elderly parents, volunteering in the community, serving in local government, or doing the loads of civic-minded tasks that volunteer lawyers have performed since the founding of our republic -- there is a tremendous social benefit to having folks away from their offices and out in the world.

Block billing or task billing will only make the client's demands more onerous. If the client says it must have the document by 7 a.m. tomorrow, then one or more lawyers will have to stay however late it takes to get it done. If the client is paying a flat rate and the bill doesn't increase because 3 lawyers had to stay in the office until 4 p.m. to meet the deadline, then the client will be more, not less willing to set such deadlines.

I agree, Raider Joe, on the backhanded sexism issue. See my post "It's o.k. to love your kids, it's good for them."