To bill (per hour) or not to bill (per hour)?

That. Is the question.

In today’s shaky economy law firms are talking about (and implementing) alternative payment methods to the traditional billable hour as corporations and other clients are less able to afford the hourly fees.

The Washington Post reports that firms are using flat fees or contingency fees, which is when a firm and its client agree on a price and the firm picks up the difference if it ends up costing more.

A survey of 200 of the country’s biggest firms found 92 percent of firm leaders had used flat fees at least once and 82 percent had used contingency fees, according to The Post.

However, according to the Wall Street Journal, the billable hour is by no means dead among the richest of the rich. The Journal reports that the most expensive lawyers are charging even more per hour, with the top 25 percent of hourly billers charging 4.9 percent more compared to 2010. The average rate is $873 per hour.

On the other end of the spectrum, however, the lowest billers are only charging a 1.3 percent more than last year at an average rate of $204 an hour.

Apologies in advance for the ALL CAPS to come, but I was forwarded a press release that makes me want to SCREAM.

Seems there is a company based in Oklahoma that has created GripeAtMe.com, which is pretty much what it sounds like. You pay money TO YELL at a complete stranger about whatever you want. If you can complain about it, a “complaint specialist” will listen. (Yup, a COMPLAINT SPECIALIST.)

One of their sample calls is from a man who asks why women tend to “get more” in divorce and custody cases. His theory? The women’s liberation movement. Bet they didn’t teach you THAT in law school.

But wait — there’s more! You can also ask the specialist to take the opposite view of yours. That’s right, you can pay to ARGUE with a COMPLETE STRANGER.

The website offers a few suggested subject areas, including culture and “go green” (quotation marks are theirs, not mine).

“Sometimes, it is nice to have someone there just to listen while you decompress about all that life has handed to you,” the site states.

Thanks, but I have those people already. They’re called FRIENDS AND FAMILY. I’d rather spend the $10 on beer with them than calling you.

A “new normal” continues to take root at law firms, according to a survey showing increases in the use of alternative fee arrangements.

Almost three in 10 in-house lawyers said they used more alternative billing arrangements in 2010, and 53 percent said they used strictly flat-fee billing on a case or project, up from 48 percent in 2009.

It’s a revealing peek into the state of the economy, and while it doesn’t mean the death of the billable hour it does underscore the ongoing debate about it — we’ve written about it here, here, here and here in recent months.

The Association of Corporate Counsel and The American Lawyer magazine do say, however, that the results of their survey show a reluctance to revert back to “the way we used to do it” when it comes to paying for legal counsel and services.

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There’s alternative billing, as my colleague Danielle Ulman wrote about in Monday’s paper, and then there just might be Glenn C. Lewis’ alleged billing practices.

Lewis had days with as many as 71 billable hours, and in a 16-month period in 2003 and 2004, he billed clients for “3,620 hours, or an average of 226 hours per month, or 7.4 hours a day, 365 days per year,” according to a story in Sunday’s Washington Post.

Lewis told the Post the 71 hours in a day billing was “block billing,” where he entered his hours for many days at once, and that he works night and weekends.

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A few years ago I was chatting with a local attorney whom I’d gotten to know in my technology reporting days. He and a few colleagues were leaving their big law firm to start a Baltimore office of another firm.

His entrepreneurial ambitions intrigued me, as did his reasons for wanting to strike out on his own — pressure to bill hours, a desire to work more closely and strategically with smaller clients. They seemed fairly universal, not just unique to the practice of law (at least if you substitute in “pressure to close sales” for “pressure to bill hours”).

A recent article at Slate breaks down the legal business model in post-economic meltdown terms and paints a pretty stark portrait of a model “in which the nation’s largest law firms turn the top law students into billable-hour-crazed associates and, sometimes, partners.”

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The ABA’s Special Committee on the U.S. News and World Report Rankings issued its findings last month. The committee, which included University of Maryland School of Law Dean Phoebe Haddon, stated the following:

We believe that, for better or worse, U.S. News rankings will continue for the foreseeable future to dominate public perceptions of how law schools compare, and that there is relatively little that leaders in legal education can do to change that in the short term.

A 2009 law school graduate named “Ethan Haines” (more on the quotation marks in a bit) disagrees. Haines is the founder of unemployedjd.com and says he represents fellow graduates and law school students “who have been disillusioned by law school employment statistics, commercial school rankings, and antiquated career counseling programs.”

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Our sister publication Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly’s blog has an interesting tale of “A job application gone very, very awry.” (Sidebar: Why is it that the only familial relationships newspapers have with one another is sister? There are no uncle publications? Second cousins? But I digress.)

The story, told entirely through e-mails, begins with a paralegal contacting a lawyer about a job. The lawyer responds that she would like him to do some freelance work in order to make sure he is the right person for the job. The paralegal responds, asking why he can’t be hired right away. And so it devolves into a verbal fight akin to one of those cartoons where the characters use white gloves to slap one another. The proverbial anvil-in-the-glove final salvo comes from the paralegal, who writes:

However, I just do not want to waste my time on a women attorney who thinks she knows it all…  It’s amazing that the [Massachusetts Bar] lets women practice law. Shouldn’t you be home cleaning and raising children?

The paralegal, a law student named Jesse Clark, reversed his position on women becoming lawyers a day after the e-mails were published. But the damage had been done. Clark subsequently announced on his since-shuttered blog that he no longer wants to become a lawyer. (You can see his farewell post here by scrolling down to May 31.)

The part that gets me about this whole exchange is what led up to Clark’s gender comments. In his previous e-mail, he ended it by telling the lawyer not to communicate with him further. Yet the next morning, the lawyer, Rosaleen J. Clayton, wrote back.

“I am not going to continue to argue with you which is why I will not address each of your comical points,” she began.

As one person noted commenting on the exchange, “While the student may have looked worse in one way, the lawyer is supposed to be professional. Getting involved in this kind pathetic spat reeks of unprofessionalism and poor judgement.”

Thoughts?

On this Take Your Child to Work Day, I remember the time in August 2008 when my daughter — a fan of the televison show Law & Order — tagged along as I covered a double-murder trial in Montgomery County.

I told her not to expect there to be a lead male prosecutor and a female assistant sitting “second chair,” a staple of the long-running NBC show. 

I also warned her that gruesome pictures of the crime scene would not be introduced into evidence, as occurs often on the program. After all – as I was told in law school – the prejudicial effect of such photographs on the defendant outweighs their probative value for the jury.

But when we entered the courtroom, there was Montgomery County State’s Attorney John J. McCarthy at the prosecution table sitting with his female assistant, Kathy Knight. And during the trial, the prosecutors successfully introduced into evidence bloody pictures from the 2002 slayings of Gregory Russell, 47, and his 9-year-old daughter Erika Smith at the father’s Silver Spring home.

My credibility now destroyed, what happened next was only fitting.

During a break in the trial, McCarthy came over and introduced himself to my daughter. She politely responded, “Hello, Mr. McCoy.”

[For those of you who may have been in a coma for the past 16 years, or without a TV, the chief prosecutor on Law & Order is Jack McCoy, played by Sam Waterston.]

As for the trial, defendant Anthony Q. Kelly was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

For extra credit, name the movie that co-starred Waterston and someone who was famously acquitted of a double murder. The answer is here.

Above the Law uncovered this job posting from Craigslist, which seeks an associate for a law firm in Germantown, Md. Had the ad been posted today rather than Tuesday, I might have suspected an April Fool’s joke, but it does look like it’s real. Among other job requirements, the ad says:

Must have libertarian/conservative viewpoint as position involves drafting position papers favorable to such viewpoint. Must be a member of or willing to join the National Rifle Association. Participation in organized shooting sports will be required.

Working in an office where everyone has a gun and knows how to shoot it must be an interesting experience.

On Monday, I had a cover story in Maryland Lawyer about an innovative and mildly controversial new program in Baltimore that will bring a service dog into child abuse forensic interviews and courtrooms. If you haven’t checked it out, please do, and make sure to watch the amazing audio slideshow accompanying it, created by our photographer Max Franz.

I got the idea for the story via Twitter, proving once again that the micro-blogging service is not (just) a time-waster. Here’s how it worked: a few weeks ago, one of the fine people I follow (I wish I could remember who) tweeted a link about how best to use dogs in the courtroom. It sounded pretty odd to me, which is often the hallmark of a great story.  I clicked on the link and got to a fact sheet hosted by the main site of Courthouse Dogs, a Seattle organization that promotes the use of dogs in the judicial system.

I called the group to find out more and asked whether anyone in Maryland was using a courthouse dog. Happily for this journalist, Baltimore had just gotten a dog, Kelly, only a few weeks before. I set up a meeting with Kelly and his human colleagues, and the article came together quickly after that. The Daily Record was able to bring you the story of Kelly the Baltimore courthouse dog before any other news outlet.

So there you have it, folks: Twitter is, in fact, useful.