10 ms·

$700/hr for legal advice vs. $100/hr for a top software engineer – why?

• lukevdp 14y ago
  I charge $100/hr and I'm nowhere near a top developer. I'm sure the top developers are charging a lot more
• dfc 14y ago
  A failure of a free market for legal services. Anyone can become a professional ios developer, there is free entry/exit in this market. The ABA artificially limits the number of potential lawyers with the Bar and requiring you go to an accredited school.[1] An intelligent individual cannot educate themselves in the legal field in their spare time and get to the point where they can hang their own shingle in the same manner an ios developer can. The number of potential lawyers is further reduced by the patent bar as well and states that do not honor out of state lawyers. [1] With the exception of a few states where one can still "read law" under a judge or attorney and take the bar.
  • jonknee 14y ago
    That's not it, there are too many attorneys as it is (new grads aren't finding jobs). One big difference is people brag about a high paid attorney (it's considered a good thing to pay a lot for legal advice) but never brag about how much they pay their developers (it's considered a good thing to pay less for developers).
    • dfc 14y ago
      I have never seen anyone claim that the ABA bar and accreditation process did not have an effect on wages. That is a tough position to stake out. Do you have any evidence that the ABA's barrier to entry into the legal market does not inflate wages? And/or that patent bar admission does not increase the amount of money a lawyer can charge for their time? Moreover the "new grads without jobs" is a fairly recent development.* Recent grads with jobs are certainly not billing $700 an hour, so I'm not really sure what that has to do with the original question. * Given the recent decline in LSAT registrations it is clear that this supply surplus is temporary and is not the new normal.
      • deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
• hhuio 14y ago
  Because software people don't ask for more. developer auction offers I'm getting is 85k to 130k so far, for someone with close to 10 year experience in the valley! wtf
  • cwh 14y ago
    Possibly it's due to your poor grammar?
    • hhuio 14y ago
      Well, English is not my first language. btw, I'm making more than double the lowest bid.
• skadamat 14y ago
  Well first off, he can value his time however much he wants. As a partner at a major law firm in SV, he's incredibly busy so his time is extremely valuable (any distraction like consulting only makes sense at a rate of ~700 per hour for him) and as a partner, he's probably making millions at the firm. If he spent 5 more hours at the firm and was able to generate a multiple of what you're paying him for 5 hours of work (3500), then he's probably not charging enough, right? If you want general legal advice for startups, talk to startup-friendly law firms. Many have packages where you give up 1-2 thousand bucks only for X number of hours + turning your startup into an INC or LLC or whatever + a small equity stake. For other law firms, you'll just have to talk to them and figure out what their rates are. Most are more in the 50-100 dollar range. Don't skimp on legal expenses, if you get sued for a few million dollars, you'll regret skimping on paying a better lawyer a few thousand bucks more.
• azzkicker 14y ago
  You missed out meeting a lawyer early in your life. You didn't get to see his lifestyle. But I am guessing you did meet a software coder early in life which left a huge impression. That's all. Remember, life isn't fair... you're a digital ditch digger! (DDD)or(3D)or(D3)
• Osmium 14y ago
  Generally, a lawyer has a lot more responsibility that a software engineer. The repercussions of a bad legal error can be felt for a long time. A software mistake? easily fixed.
  • petercooper 14y ago
    And, typically, a far more expensive education.
  • kefs 14y ago
    Unless, of course.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-critical_system#Software_engineering_for_life-critical_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-critical_system#Software_...
• Terry_B 14y ago
  In addition to the other reasons here, I think when it comes to lawyers and doctors, people typically want "the best". Are you willing to take a risk with your health or getting into legal trouble? So the price of the best people just keeps going up and up. With developers, there is more of a concept of "good enough". As long as you find someone that can build the thing and it works, that's good enough.
• petercooper 14y ago
  He is very bright and hard working, but can anything justify $700/hr. Are you going to employ him at the $700/hr rate? If so, you would have justified it. Unless the $700/hr were just a ploy to start a pricing negotiation, rather than what he typically bills, the cost is being justified by the people keeping him in business. That aside, if he works for a big firm, it'd be fairer to compare his rate to that of what a consulting firm bills out its developers (which is very far north of $100/hr).
• rm999 14y ago
  Is it fair to compare a major law firm with an independent software engineer? At my last company (~3000 employees) when I did billable work they charged the client 300/hour. From a few minutes of googling I am reading that typical lawyer fees (not big law firms) are 200-300 dollar an hour, eg: http://www.topix.com/forum/city/utica-ny/TDV8TU0N3HTLL1UMK http://www.topix.com/forum/city/utica-ny/TDV8TU0N3HTLL1UMK. I've never hired a lawyer and I've never directly contracted myself out so I am by no means an expert on this topic. Great question though.
  • jbester 14y ago
    Agreed with parent. The burdened rate (that is pay, plus benefits, plus company overhead) for a decent sized software company will easily be $200 - $800 /hr depending on location and company size. Lawyers are licensed and specialized - the costs associated are passed through to the customers into their rate.
    • codeonfire 14y ago
      With overhead meaning seven layers of management, their bonuses, company vehicles, and stock grants.
• jonknee 14y ago
  Because you're getting a steal from the iOS developer and you're also going direct vs through a firm for the attorney. To keep the situations similar you would need to hire a consulting company and see what they charge you per hour (or find an indie attorney).
• bengotow 14y ago
  1. A top iOS developer usually costs more - between $150/hr and $200/hr in my experience. In the valley, it might be even more. Maybe your guy should be charging more, maybe he doesn't feel like it! A lot of guys I've worked with don't realize how much they're worth. Either way, hold on to him and give him a bonus when he finishes the project on time. 2. I think you're paying $700/hr because you 1) went straight for a partner and 2) you went straight for a major law firm in the valley. It's also a mindset difference. I think lawyers charge based on the value they add, not the hours they work, whereas developers typically think about hours. A developer who writes a piece of code that saves you $1M should charge $100k for it, and a lawyer probably would. On the other hand, your developer would probably charge you 1.5 hrs * $100 / hr. :) * Full disclosure: I'm a developer and I have lawyer friends, but
• whyme 14y ago
  1. Lawyers incur more liability with their work. 2. The quantity of workload they provide per job is less, thus pricing is more dense (i.e. companies realize programmers work thousands of hours for a project and that the project viability would collapse at $700/hr) 3. In many cases you have no choice but to hire a lawyer, while more often you can say no to a programmer should the economics not support the project. 4. A lawyer has to go to school for approx. 6 to 8 years (at least in Canada) while programmers have a wide variety of education levels. I'm sure I could list more...
  • kichik 14y ago
    That is my understanding as well. Liability costs a lot. Think insurance costs, the costs you'd have to pay for every mistake, etc. "It's not a bug, it's a feature" doesn't cut it when someone's freedom or fortune is at stake.
• keithwarren 14y ago
  I truly hope he is not a great iOS developer because that rate is criminally low. There is something magical that happens in the 100 pennies between 99 per hour and 100 per hour, a mental chasm that is in reality no different than 98/hr vs 99/hr but we make it into a big deal. Why he chose that number, and why people choose any number for an hourly rate is always a curious thing to me. We pick numbers that we think are palatable with no real regard for the same rigor we put into other processes. Has he tested his rate? But the idea of hourly rates is accepting of the premise incorrectly... My guess is that if he is truly great he could make some lawyers jealous. Charging $700/hr may seem far fetched for a developer but making 700/hr is a very different thing. 70K bill to a client for something that took 100 hours to make is a much more salient strategy if you give them what they want.
  • RivieraKid 14y ago
    I'm a top Android developer from the Czech Republic and usually charge about $25/hour.
    • zeidrich 14y ago
      And this is probably why. Americans can hire developers from other countries where they can be paid less. Americans can't hire lawyers from the Czech Republic.
    • gokulk 14y ago
      show us some of your examples. would be interesting to compare between app styles and price difference in US and other countries
      • RivieraKid 14y ago
        Sorry, I'd rather remain pseudonymous on HN. I can send you links to the apps via email if you want.
    • clashofthetitan 14y ago
      Hi RivieraKid, would love to get in touch about some work - do you think you could drop me an email or let me know your address so I can contact you? can reach me at: HanLAyNijhfB@meltmail.com
• K0t4 14y ago
  You sure it isnt $700/hr that hes with the client? Not trying to justify it but theres a lot of backend work like research that goes into legal advice and that cost is usually lumped in with the cost of the hour he actually talks to you. Also law school is very expensive and people know that so they can mentally justify paying more. You can make $100/hr programming and have no education. Plus their are tons of programmers who make more than $100/hr
• Suncho 14y ago
  Because if they were paid anywhere close to the same amount, who would choose to be a lawyer? Being a software engineers is way more fun! =) Regardless, I wouldn't worry about it because software engineers will be automating away lawyers soon anyway. ;)
• jaredstenquist 14y ago
  This is why I built LawyerClock. I got pissed off at the long calls with corporate attorneys for $600+ per hour (per partner!). http://www.lawyerclock.com http://www.lawyerclock.com * I coded this during lawyer meetings.
• vannevar 14y ago
  I think this is a transient phenomenon. The software profession is only a few decades old, while there have been centuries of lawyering. Not all lawyers make anywhere near $700/hour; in fact, I'd say the average lawyer probably makes about as much as the average developer. A developer aristocracy has yet to emerge, but as time goes on you'll see rates at the top end rising much faster than the average, and there will be $700/hr developers.
• itsprofitbaron 14y ago
  During late 1990s aka. "the dot com boom" there was a severe shortage of corporate lawyers in Silicon Valley due to the deal work exploding with record IPOs, M&A and VC activity etc. Alongside the shortage, the cost of living in the Bay Area was rising which increased when there was an exodus of lawyers from law firms going to the Bay Area for in-house opportunities at startups. As a result to combat this, Law firms in SF/LA increased their associates pay which was then being matched throughout the rest of the country. Once this happened it resulted in the increased wages leading to the prices at the level they are because: - Noone wants to cut their wages - companies also do anything they can to prevent wage cuts even if that means reducing headcount. - Law firms prestige are linked to money - in order to attract the best talent they compete on price by paying the highest starting salaries and bonuses. Likewise in order to keep the rest of the employees motivated they pay the same salaries across departments. Thus they then had to tackle the issue of the increase overheads so law firms increased their rates to manage increased overheads and to increase profitability of the firm ensuring they keep their best talent around. However, with that said the reason lawyers are expensive despite the "oversupply" of them is because if you require a law firm with experience that is able to handle complex litigation, transactions etc and is able to allocate a significant amount of man-hours at your case then you're going to have to compensate them in order to do so. So to answer the question are lawyers expensive, they're not. You can find one to handle basic paper work inexpensively however, if you require an experienced lawyer who can handle complex litigation, complex litigation, transactions etc and is able to allocate a significant amount of man-hours at your case then you're going to have to compensate them in order to do so.
• DropRob 14y ago
  Because a lawyer can give you a lot more value in 5h than a software developer in 5h.
• grumps 14y ago
  I think it's already been pointed out but I'll clarify a little more. You've hired an independent developer, at a reasonable rate. Hiring a lawyer from a law firm, comes at the rate of the firm. He bring to the table the resources of a large law firm, and along with the cost of operating a law firm. In addition to his nice salary. If you had hired an tech consulting firm you'd be looking a similar hourly rate if you brought in a partner.
  • flatfilefan 14y ago
    this
• rdouble 14y ago
  He's not really your friend if he's charging you $700 an hour.
• gnosis 14y ago
  I've known network consultants who charged banks and other Wall St firms $2600/hr for troubleshooting. A network outage could easily cost some of these firms millions of dollars per hour, so paying $2600/hr to fix such an outage is petty cash in comparison.
  • biot 14y ago
    > $2600/hr for troubleshooting Did they used to work in telecom? That hourly rate really hertz.
  • Firehed 14y ago
    Definitely the right way to think about it - lawyers (or network technicians) as cost-saving tools, rather than direct expenses. Hire the $2600/hr guy and be done in ten minutes because of his fifteen years experience and deep knowledge of the system; spend $433 very quickly. Pick the $50/hr rent-an-intern and you're down for a day while they're googling the fixes. Spend about the same amount, but avoid the losses from 7+ extra hours of downtime. Time is money, after all. Same thing with an after-hours/emergency call to a plumber. Yes, you'll spend twice as much - but that's nothing compared to what it will cost to repair the structural damage to your house because your toilet overflowed and you ended up with three inches of standing water soaking into your everything.
• djblue2009 14y ago
  Even though there may be a surplus of lawyers in general out there, that specific lawyer can charge that much because (this sounds obvious) people are willing to pay that much. If he specializes in a certain area with the potential for a big upside for a client - doesn't have to be monetary - think immigration law (however, usually these clients can't necessarily pay that rate), people are willing to pay for peace of mind and hopefully just once for the job done right.
• swampthing 14y ago
  * law firms are inefficient in their use of technology * legal work is more likely to be boring, so you have to pay people more to do it (this is related to the first point above) * if an app has a bug, it's usually easy to spot - if a contract has a bug, you may never know about it until it bites you. so you pay for the best attorney you can get, in the hopes of getting fewer bugs * lawyers are more at the beck and call of their clients - really need something done overnight or over the weekend? they'll do it (though they'll resent you for it)
  • dromidas 14y ago
    Inefficiency is no excuse. I'm sure there are as many lawyers who love or hate their job as there are developers that do... some people (like myself) love doing the work but I have many colleagues who find it tedius and boring. I would say also not an excuse. Security or data integrity flaws are no more apparent than contract holes, and often are equally as disruptive. Developers aren't at the beck and call? Lol I would say that's a misconception. Late nights and weekends are NO stranger to developers. Especially in actual companies (vs independent) where deadlines are approaching its very common to be strongly encouraged (read: required) to work weekends. It's more likely that the combination of cheap alternatives (outsourcing, developer living in a carboard box in san diego, etc) are numerous and you don't need indepth knowledge to click buttons on your program to see it works like you wanted it to but you do need all that knowledge to look at a contract and confirm its legitimacy.
    • swampthing 14y ago
      i'm not trying to make excuses for lawyers, i'm just providing you with reasons. and as someone who's been both a developer and a lawyer, lawyers are much more at the beck and call of clients. software engineers generally know when they have deadlines approaching. lawyers get informed Friday night of a deadline they have Monday morning (transactional lawyers, that is). your last sentence is precisely the point i was making re bugs.
  • gnosis 14y ago
    "legal work is more likely to be boring, so you have to pay people more to do it" Sweeping floors and cleaning toilets is also pretty boring, but I don't see anyone paying janitors more because of it.
• alexdmoore 14y ago
  no, you are taking to the wrong person in the firm. You need the more junior lawyer who can likely do your work too. Major partners are only needed to do huge deals or very complicated legal procedures. Just ask around.
• femto 14y ago
  Is it feasible to program a machine learning system (such as Watson?) to run a straightforward legal case, with a natural language interface? Presumably the majority of "bread and butter" legal cases don't require an innovative step? Rather, they involve rolling out a set of standard arguments and countering a set of standard arguments put forward by the opposition, a bit like a chess game? I'm talking straighforward stuff, rather than the types of cases that set legal precedent. If so, wouldn't it be a case of cramming a machine full of the necessary legal information, then doing a search to navigate a path to a winning position? If a winning position with the required certainty could not be found by the machine, the legal advice might be "call a human lawyer".
  • Anechoic 14y ago
    Is it feasible to program a machine learning system (such as Watson?) to run a straightforward legal case, with a natural language interface? The law is full of context and interpretation details. One example my business constantly runs into is weather or not we have to register as a 'foreign business" when we do business in other states (my business is an engineering consulting business that does work in many states, sometimes requiring travel, sometimes not). All of the states we looked into have the same basic wording tin the foreign business statue, but they interpret it different - for some states, you only have to register is you maintain an office presence; for some states you have to register only if you spend a significant amount of time in the state, other states you have to register if the money originates in the state, even if you never set foot there. I'd love to see someone with ML or AI experience address the challenges involved in this. I would imagine it would be possible, but require a shitload of work, and even then may require some review.
    • wfn 14y ago
      If the rules of interpretation (one might even say that this is the definition of 'context' in this sense) can be strictly defined (formalized), e.g. what you wrote: > for some states, you only have to register is you maintain an office presence; for some states you have to register only if you spend a significant amount of time in the state, [...] then this is doable, in principle. But the overall project and required workload would indeed be vast.. I wonder how much one might have to work to have some kind of a working PoC.. NLTK and their computational linguistics book / python tutorial might be a good start. e.g. http://nltk.org/book/ch10.html http://nltk.org/book/ch10.html - we can do things like dt = nltk.DiscourseTester(['A student dances', 'Every student is a person']) dt.add_sentence('No person dances', consistchk=True) - throws error 'Inconsistent discourse ..[list of predicates etc]' dt.retract_sentence('No person dances', verbose=True) - outputs Current sentences are s0: A student dances s1: Every student is a person But scaling this / making it work for something more than these simple linguistic tasks.. quite an undertaking! In any case, the field in question (and the task at hand) is very interesting, and I hope that lots of interesting stuff will be done in comp.linguistics / nlp in the near future.
• andrewgjohnson 14y ago
  The problem is there's no lawyers charging extremely low prices in third world countries and it's exceptionally unlikely that you would hire a lawyer that isn't within an hour's drive from you. The same can't be said for programmers.
• dahurr 14y ago
  To add what others have said, lawyers went through more schooling at much expense. $700 is a decent rate for a partner at a top law firm.
• gnosis 14y ago
  * Outsourcing hasn't hit the legal profession like it has software development. * You can't just read a legal book over the weekend and call yourself an attorney. * Open source and Free software. While lawyers do do some pro-bono work, there's not nearly as much of it being done as there is volunteer work being done by software developers around the world.
• chaz 14y ago
  There's a good thread on Quora about the price of lawyers. Without logging in, the first answer is available here: http://www.quora.com/Attorneys/Why-are-lawyers-so-expensive-even-with-the-excess-supply-of-lawyers http://www.quora.com/Attorneys/Why-are-lawyers-so-expensive-... The second answer, which is also helpful, uses graphs from these articles, which helps illustrate the bimodal distribution: http://www.gradschools.com/article-detail/worst-reasons-law-school-1788 http://www.gradschools.com/article-detail/worst-reasons-law-... http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/the-two-track-lawyer-market/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/the-two-track-l...
• znmeb 14y ago
  You want to charge $700 / hour for programming? You want to be a professional in the same sense as a doctor or a lawyer? Fine! 1. Get a PhD in computer science or software engineering. 2. Submit to state licensing, certifications, fees, examinations and codes of conduct. 3. Buy liabilty insurance in case your screw-ups hurt someone and they sue your incompetent ass. Look, doctors and lawyers have been around at least since civilization arose, say six to ten thousand years. Programming as a profession independent of, say, doing math or building weapons systems or accounting has been around only since the 1950s, and it wasn't till the 1960s that large numbers of people got paid to do nothing but programming.
  • mattquiros 14y ago
    I'm sorry but I fail to see your point and the need to write with that tone. Prostitutes have been around in civilizations for far longer than doctors and lawyers and yet they're still not getting paid as much. And the statement that software engineers "do nothing but programming" reeks of ignorance.
• njharman 14y ago
  software eng did/does not have to go to law school (or take any college really) pass the bar (or any certification at all) maintain his membership in bar (or any level of professional conduct or accountability) be legally responsible for the work he performs (in same way lawyers, doctors and other accredited / certification passing professions must) See also supply and demand. Every half skilled monkey can be an iOS developer (or any kind of developer. Honestly, it's really not that hard. Compared to lawyering, doctoring. Also developer != architect, lead, technical manager, entrepreneur, etc which are all much more difficult. OTOH people who couldn't hack EE or that drop out of college can be successful developers.)
• rayiner 14y ago
  Prices are of course about supply and demand. The supply of business lawyers is limited, which keeps prices (relatively) high. What keeps supply limited? In practice, bar admission requirements are not the operative bottleneck. There are about twice as many JD's each year as there are jobs for them, and the prices for entry-level legal work (across the whole industry) have fallen far below that of entry-level engineering work. A programmer from a top 100 school with decent but not amazing grades can come out expecting to get a job and making $45k+. A lawyer with similar credentials might go a year without finding a job and end up making $35-40k at a small firm. So what keeps prices high at the top end? The answer is branding. Business clients don't trust their sensitive legal work to firms that don't have brands. And these firms that have brands don't hire just anyone. Only about 10-15% of fresh JD's end up at a medium to large firm working on corporate law, and the majority of them come out of the top 20 (of 200+) law schools. There are only so many graduates of Stanford and Berkeley to go around, so only so many of them get hired and trained at business law firms, and only so many of those make it to partner and build up years of experience. This is the real supply bottleneck. You've always seen this phenomenon in banking and consulting (business clients trust their M&A to Goldman, who hires from Harvard and Princeton, maybe Yale if they're really feeling pinched). Now, you're seeing it in engineering too. It used to be that large companies didn't care much about where you went to school or what your grades were. But these days, places like Google, Facebook, etc, disproportionately recruits from the Stanford/MIT set. As a result, salaries at these companies have bid up dramatically. I hear a fourth year engineer at Google can make $250k+. That's comparable to a fourth year lawyer at a top law firm. These salaries were unheard of in engineering back when places like IBM didn't care all that much about Stanford versus CSU.
  • arikrak 14y ago
    Not everyone gets the most expensive product or service. Shouldn't people be able to get cheaper lawyers? Why don't some of the unemployed lawyers create budget practices? No person or business would be willing to use them?
    • rayiner 14y ago
      There are cheaper lawyers, even cheaper business lawyers. See: http://lawfirmsuccess.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/big-news-for-biglaw-partner-billing-bad-news-for-boutique-firm-prices http://lawfirmsuccess.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/big-news-for-.... The inter-quartile ranges in the study are $200 - $875. E.g. see: http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/print-edition/2012/04/27/lawyer-inflation-with-economy.html?page=all http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/print-edition/2012/04/27/l.... The firm in the article is a 135 lawyer outfit (so solidly on the larger end of mid-sized) with offices in Boston and D.C. and four other Northeastern cities. Partners bill out between $300-$500. (No affiliation, just Google-ed). Experienced solo practitioners serving individuals in personal matters might charge $100-$150. And if you just need someone with a JD, you can get one for $10/hour on Craigslist. Then on the other end of the spectrum, you have firms like Wachtell Lipton, who basically only do billion dollar M&A deals. They don't even charge a fee, they charge a percentage of the deal value. People hire them because when you've got a $5 billion deal, you don't care if your legal fees end up in the tens of millions of dollars.
• wallacrw 14y ago
  All major Silicon Valley law firms (Gunderson, Wilson Sonsini, Fenwick, Cooley) will defer your fees to get you as a client. You should negotiate at least $15k-$20k of deferral of fees if you are a startup, which means you won't cut them a check until/unless you get financed. They should also offer you a discount on their normal rates of 10-20%. And they may ask for warrants; up to you to issue these. They may pound sand, but if they really want those, then you should be getting a lot of legal work for free. The vast majority of legal work they do for you as a startup is form work, so don't ever pay a partner more than a half hour to review it. 90% of the work is literally changing names in a document: incorporation docs, board notes, issuance of options, option plan, assignments of IP, and financing docs should all be standardized. I know this because I worked at Gunderson as an attorney. What you want from startup lawyers is a clean form that your investors have seen before. Don't do anything that makes an investor think twice. Any form from the firms I mentioned above will do. Net net: you shouldn't worry about $700/hour. It's too much, you shouldn't be hiring that particular attorney, and even if you do owe thousands of dollars, you shouldn't have to pay it until you're financed (which means you have the cash anyway).
• patio11 14y ago
  The only thing you need to so to charge $700 an hour is convince a business your services are worth that much, typically by saying that in X time you can deliver Y result which will increase revenue or decrease costs by some number Z, where Z is greater than your rate times X. There exist at least some software developers who bill $700 an hour or north of that, by the way.
• tzs 14y ago
  One of chef Gordon Ramsay's signature dishes is lobster ravioli with celery root cream and shellfish vinaigrette. If you were to hire Ramsay to come and make that dish for a dinner party at your house, I'd guess his hourly rate would be pretty high. Now suppose you hired Ramsay, but instead of a dinner party it was for your kid's birthday party--and all you want Ramsay to do is boil Oscar Meyer hot dogs and serve then on Safeway hot dog buns with Heinz Ketchup (and only that) on them, and later scoop some store-bought ice cream onto store-bought cake. This is something you could hire a neighborhood teen to do for $20. Do you think Ramsay is going to do it for $20, because you are asking him to do something much simpler than make his signature food? Of course not. He's charging for his talent and skill. If you want to misuse that by having him work on something that is trivial and can be done easily by someone with much less talent or skill, that's your problem. I suspect that's what you are doing with the lawyer. A partner in a major firm has the skill and talent to work on very large and complicated matters that involve big companies and a lot of money--things like major mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, and such. You are asking him for something that could probably be drafted by a paralegal from his office, and then checked over by a junior associate--the legal equivalent of boiling hot dogs.
  • rmc 14y ago
    Well, I'm sure if you paid Gordon Ramsay his regular (high) rate to do the crappy kids birthday, he'd probably take it. I'm sure there is no end of little hand holding that top brass do. So long as the rate is right.
  • Quizzy 14y ago
    Bad analogy. Partners in big firm get big bucks as the "rainmaker", legal skills are not why partners are paid well. If an attorney has only legal skills but no ability to land business, he will always be a junior partner at best or fired and replaced by a more promising graduate. Good attorneys are a dime a dozen, but rainmakers are worth three times as much.
    • 1123581321 14y ago
      That is not true. First, there is a common type of rainmaker who has developed a reputation as a very good lawyer. Second, the other reasons lawyers become partners are a) to reward them for their skill and loyalty to the firm, b) because of their connections which they use to negotiate, c) because of their skill in managing associates or simply the entire firm.
• ekm2 14y ago
  I do not get the logic most of you are running through:Lawyers have had a lot more education AND there are many of them out there,so they get paid more?
• Mankhool 14y ago
  It is his firm billing him out at $700/hr. He's not putting that full amount into his pocket.
• zacaltman 14y ago
  It's a matter of what it's worth to you. What risks are you willing to take? There are developers who may charge $700/hr, but you've chosen to go with a developer who charges $100/hr because that's what you need at this stage. If he made a mistake, it's not likely to cost you EVERYTHING to fix up. Somebody points out the bug / issue and you can hire him to sort it out and push out an update. Speak to a developer who works at a law firm ;) Conversely, people device to go with a $700/hr lawyer because of their experience and reputation. You're paying for them to not make a mistake because it may just cost you EVERYTHING. It's not a mistake you can fix after it's found. Something wrong with your patent? Contract? Not something you can say 'oops, it's fixed now' to.
• davimack 14y ago
  There's a fundamental difference: Billable Hours. For a lawyer, if they put in 100 hours to come up with a 2-page letter, they charge for those 100 hours. The next time a client comes to them with a similar problem, they charge for 100 hours. Software developers charge for time actually spent working on a particular project. If they reuse code, they don't (typically) charge anything. If developers were to charge for the number of hours spent writing that code they're reusing, they'd be more like lawyers.
• pasbesoin 14y ago
  If you are using a partner in a "major law firm" for routine contract work, you're doing it wrong. (If you use that firm, such work should be turned over to a less senior staff member and billed at a somewhat lower rate. If the partner is a friend or friendly acquaintance, s/he might ensure the assignment is to an attorney (and possibly assisting staff) they respect and they might look over the results before they are returned to you.)
• charlesjshort 14y ago
  Corruption, plain and simple. The high price lawyers have to grease the wheels to ensure the win.