IANAL, but I’m married to a partner in biglaw. Clients routinely refuse to pay for work they perceive (rightly or wrongly) to have been done inefficiently or un

IANAL, but I’m married to a partner in biglaw. Clients routinely refuse to pay for work they perceive (rightly or wrongly) to have been done inefficiently or unnecessarily. For instance, this past week, my wife had an associate who took an absurdly long time to research and write a draft of a brief, and almost all that time will be getting written off by the firm because the client won’t pay for it. Every large client is sifting those bills with a fine-tooth comb to determine what they won’t pay, and the firm isn’t going to risk future business for the sake of dickering over an associate’s hours. So even if it was true in the past that the billable hour incentivized inefficient work, it seems that clients have figured out how to even up the scales for the most part.