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[DogDayPM 9er9er9er]

FORTRAN 77 was probably the best course I took at university.. after I.C. processing.

I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the few other languages I was exposed to.  Just "made sense" to me - it was like you could just program in Engrish. 

[Wiscagent]

Why is it that actual hours worked for a client is not equal to billable hours? 

I understand that the standard practice of law firms is to bill at an hourly basis, for example $200/hour.  An agent or attorney may actually for 40 hours on some matter, for which the client would nominally be billed $8000; but the law firm may actually just bill for 30 hours of work, i.e. $6000.  It would be more honest and transparent for the firm to charge $150/hour for the actual 40 hours of work, which would still be $6000.

I recently handled a case as a contractor for a law firm.  The client candidly told that she didn't care how many hours I worked, she just wanted a good quality product by a certain date; and we agreed to a fixed price.  Yet when I submitted billing paperwork to the law firm, they wanted to know how many hours I worked and at what rate.  So I estimated my actual hours and calculated a rate.  But the hourly rate was a number I made up after the fact.  Why would the law firm want that number?

When I get my car fixed, I am concerned with how much I pay in total.  The parts + labor breakdown helps me understand how they arrived at that total.  While the mechanic does list hours worked and an hourly rate, it's just not important to me.  Just like my client in the example above, my concern is to get good quality work finished by a certain time or date.  The only thing the hours and hourly rate provide is an explanation why a job such as a head gasket replacement is expensive, even though the parts are relatively inexpensive.

[klaviernista]

Why is it that actual hours worked for a client is not equal to billable hours? 

Likely it has nothing to do with the client and everything to do with the impression the working attorney wants to give his/her superiors.  E.g., the working attorney might spend 10 hours on an action item for which the client will be billed 6.  If the attorney "self-cuts" and records 8 hours on the matter instead of 10, he/she will appear more efficient to their superiors.

This is why I favor fixed fee service for many aspects of prosecution.  It eliminates all the games associated with the billable hour.  In the end, all that matters in a fixed fee scheme is total revenue.  Then again, it does promote shoddy work product by encouraing a attorney to do as many matters as possible in the shortest period of time.

[stuffball]

Klav brings up a great point by saying that a fixed fee system has pitfalls.  Yet, it seems to me like it makes more sense for a prosecution shop and would be a godsend to patent prosecutors in general practice firms.

Here's the deal with this - what sucks so much isn't the billable hour.  It's that prosecutors' time is counted in exactly the same way litigators' time is counted.  That's just not fair.  It is much harder to scrape together 1950 billables from prosecution than it is from litigation or other "real" law work.  It's unfair to have a system that simply ignores this difference.

[khazzah]

Why is it that actual hours worked for a client is not equal to billable hours? 

Are you really asking about "billable hours"? Or are you really asking about "billed hours". Because most of the rest of your question has to do with what gets billed to the client. 

Clearly, time spent on a client matter should be billABLE to a client. And for firms that have a billABLE minimum, you would then get credit for this time. AFAIK, most big to medium sized firms have billABLE minimums.

Now, how much of the billABLE time is billED to the client is another question. There are three obvious factors that influence this: the attorney's bill rate (directly related to salary); the price that the client will bear (reasonable cap) or has agreed to pay (flat fee); and the amount of time that others bill to the matter.

So generally speaking, as long as you record time spent on client matters, you can meet your billABLE.

That said, IMHO there is one prosecution-specific factor that makes it hard to meet billABLE. And that's the umber of matters that we work on. Many of my days are spent doing very small tasks, lots of 0.1s and some 0.2s: calls from Examiners; quick client emails; lots of coordinating with my assistant. All of these tasks are billABLE. Yet many folks find it difficult to track small amounts of time spread across so many matters.

All of this dodges the separate question of whether a particular firm/partner has a culture of "don't record your billable time because I don't want to cut it".