David Giacalone, one of my favourite bloggers, combining as he does wizard legal comment with effortless haiku mastery, has a most amusing take on the hourly charge -v- value billing debate. A babysitter proposes that instead of a flat hourly fee for looking after 5 kids, aged 3-13, she charge by how much different activities are worth to the parents:
Here are some of the things that I do or might do while babysitting that I believe are especially valuable and useful for you as parents and for your children. Next to each is my proposed “value-added fee.”
Get Chubby Cathy to bed with only 1 snack [$5]
Show 4th-grader Mikey a Memory Trick for vocabulary and multiplication tables (invaluable for standardized tests) [$20]
Keep Mikey from staring at my chest [$12]
Secretly decode IM messages between Sadie and her girlfriends [$10]
Stop Sadie from sneaking out her window to meet boyfried Butch [$50]
Stop Butch from climbing into Sadie’s bedroom window [$70]
Mediate X-box sharing schedule [$10]
Keep my younger brother from eating all your cookies and ice cream [$6]
Stop Jack Jr. from beating Mikey to a pulp [$15]
Rescue baby Anny from swimming pool [$500]
It’s good, and topical enough for American lawyers, where VB is all the rage now at the consumer end, at least. David – and I completely agree – takes a rather more cynical view:
As agent of reality, and consumer advocate, I must often tell my colleagues two things they don’t want to hear: First, in general, attorney services are worth a whole lot less (add a lot less value) now that consumers can read and write and technology makes it possible to provide legal services far more quickly and efficiently (or through self-help); and Second, there are over one million attorneys in the USA and they are all looking to make a buck. These factors can’t be avoided by coming up with new ways to “sell” and “price” the product or to push back market forces and the tide of history.
When I consulted my sophisticated-US-buyers-of-legal-services-clients as to whether they would prefer me to offer some form of value billing they were very definite in telling me that this did not suit them and they wanted me to stick with the hourly rate for the litigation work that I do for them.
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