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Law firms often charge by the hour, right? If my law firm switches to Linux, would they bill me more hours if they run into technical issues?

pseingatl 5y ago
OH YES THEY WOULD. Nothing like paying a $500/hr lawyer for debugging a Word table (how can I center text in a table?) or an autonumbered nested list. Not to mention trying to figure out why a whole section doesn't appear in the ToC because "Update Table of Contents" only changed page numbers (Styles weren't used for that section).
- james_in_the_uk 5y ago
  At the type of firms charging those rates, fixing Word's many formatting glitches is usually done by non-fee earning staff.
  - pseingatl 5y ago
    I see you haven't been in the market for legal services recently. Yes, Magic Circle and Silver Circle firms have IT departments and secretarial services. Barristers have nothing like that. Thirty lawyer London firms charge London rates (when they can) and don't have that secretarial back-up. Baker & McKenzie even has an office (a subsidiary) to do such work. But--this encourages the £500./hr lawyer to not learn this arcana. He moves to a firm without the backup and then guess who is charging the client for tinkering with tables (can't you just scale a table in Word? No.) or trying to add a section and subsections to a document with auto-numbering in place; he doesn't know how to do this so futzes around and finally decides to manually add the section; looks fine on the screen until he prints--to pdf, why not?--but the new manually entered section isn't in the so carefully prepared Table of Contents, updating the table only changes the page numbers, the section isn't showing and it's not in the index either, and counsel for the seller is screaming something about a closing and the paralegal who is supposed to know these things hasn't learned auto-numbering ("learned" isn't really accurate here, "seen in practice" is the best you can hope for) and decides to fix things by making everything manual (not too hard--just convert to text and then past back) and so yes, very much yes, the £500./lawyer at the 30-member firm is definitely charging for this under the general heading of "Revising" for which there is a numerical code when the accountants send out the bill. Were the bill broken down to include "futzing with Word" then the client would refuse to pay, but the client never can get down to that level of granularity. Maybe at a three hour deposition in a dispute over fees--where if you lose, you pay for three sets of attorneys (your new, Word-savvy attorney, your old non-Word savvy attorney, and your old attorney's attorney--now its £1500/hour, by the way), but the judge will not question the non-Word savvy lawyer because he too has had to futz with Word and that is part of the legal practice that Mr. Client agreed to pay £500/hour for. And that paralegal is a fee earner, haven't you looked at a legal bill lately? Next case.

pseingatl 5y ago

OH YES THEY WOULD. Nothing like paying a $500/hr lawyer for debugging a Word table (how can I center text in a table?) or an autonumbered nested list. Not to mention trying to figure out why a whole section doesn't appear in the ToC because "Update Table of Contents" only changed page numbers (Styles weren't used for that section).

james_in_the_uk 5y ago
At the type of firms charging those rates, fixing Word's many formatting glitches is usually done by non-fee earning staff.
- pseingatl 5y ago
  I see you haven't been in the market for legal services recently. Yes, Magic Circle and Silver Circle firms have IT departments and secretarial services. Barristers have nothing like that. Thirty lawyer London firms charge London rates (when they can) and don't have that secretarial back-up. Baker & McKenzie even has an office (a subsidiary) to do such work. But--this encourages the £500./hr lawyer to not learn this arcana. He moves to a firm without the backup and then guess who is charging the client for tinkering with tables (can't you just scale a table in Word? No.) or trying to add a section and subsections to a document with auto-numbering in place; he doesn't know how to do this so futzes around and finally decides to manually add the section; looks fine on the screen until he prints--to pdf, why not?--but the new manually entered section isn't in the so carefully prepared Table of Contents, updating the table only changes the page numbers, the section isn't showing and it's not in the index either, and counsel for the seller is screaming something about a closing and the paralegal who is supposed to know these things hasn't learned auto-numbering ("learned" isn't really accurate here, "seen in practice" is the best you can hope for) and decides to fix things by making everything manual (not too hard--just convert to text and then past back) and so yes, very much yes, the £500./lawyer at the 30-member firm is definitely charging for this under the general heading of "Revising" for which there is a numerical code when the accountants send out the bill. Were the bill broken down to include "futzing with Word" then the client would refuse to pay, but the client never can get down to that level of granularity. Maybe at a three hour deposition in a dispute over fees--where if you lose, you pay for three sets of attorneys (your new, Word-savvy attorney, your old non-Word savvy attorney, and your old attorney's attorney--now its £1500/hour, by the way), but the judge will not question the non-Word savvy lawyer because he too has had to futz with Word and that is part of the legal practice that Mr. Client agreed to pay £500/hour for. And that paralegal is a fee earner, haven't you looked at a legal bill lately? Next case.