Comments on: Alan Dershowitz aims for a Reversal of Fortune for Lawyers with Viewabill

By: Viewabill: Alan Dershowitz Wants Your Clients to Know What You Are Doing - Lawyerist.com

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 19:00:15 +0000

[...] If you want to try this out with your clients now, and you use Freshbooks, just edit any project and check the box next to Client can see summaries of dates worked and tasks logged. I don’t think they will get as much information as they would from Viewabill, but they will certainly get enough to sound the alarm if they think you are out of control. (via The Trial Warrior Blog) [...]

By: Antonin I. Pribetic

Antonin I. Pribetic — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:49:41 +0000

Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I agree that viewabill may have some benefit in open-ended projects. As you correctly observe, litigation, in particular, has too many independent variables and client’s rarely appreciate the skill and experience required to conduct litigation. They are primarily interested in the outcome- settlement of judgment— but a litigation budget is indispensible.

By: Windypundit

Windypundit — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:44:51 +0000

I, on the other hand, have no problem with this concept whatsoever. But then I’m not a lawyer, I’m a software engineer. We’ve been doing stuff like this for years.

Our projects are a lot more open-ended. For example, it takes a certain amount of development to get a commercial website to the point of viability, but after that it’s just a question of how fast you want to spend money to keep fixing bugs and adding features, and the choices of which bugs to fix first and which features to add next are entirely up to the client (within technical limitations). In a modern agile development process, it wouldn’t be surprising to discuss progress and priorities with the client every single day.

It’s not about snooping, and it’s not about trust. It is a bit about bean counting, but that’s a perfectly legitimate concern when working on an open-ended project. Mostly, it’s about communicating regularly to make sure I’m always working on what will give the client the most value. At any point, we should be able to stop and say this is the best we could do with the time and resources we’ve had so far. That takes constant communication, because the client is the only true judge of value, and I’m the only true judge of cost.

It sounds like someone (software engineers?) is trying to take a very successful software project management methodology and apply it to the legal world, but I don’t know if lawyers have any kinds of work that fits the model. I suspect legal matters aren’t nearly as open-ended as software projects, and especially in the case of litigation they’re much harder to control. Also, I’m pretty sure the client is in a much poorer position to understand the value of particular bits of legal work.

BTW, I looked into signing up, and Viewabill for those who are billing for services starts at $4/matter/month, minimum of 10 matters.

By: Antonin I. Pribetic

Antonin I. Pribetic — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:05:02 +0000

Thanks, Max.

“Friends don’t let friends bill their friends in real-time”, or something like that.

Micro-management and auditing of lawyer’s work-in-progress does put into question the trust between a lawyer and client. Viewabill states that the app is free for clients, but, as you point out, it is the lawyer who likely faces additional administrative costs, which ironically, will be passed on to the client.

By: Max Kennerly

Max Kennerly — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:54:58 +0000

Any client of mine can ask for a description of my pending work at any time, but a client who feels the need to snoop on me in real-time obviously doesn’t trust me and thus obviously needs to hire someone else.

Then there’s another problem: if you’re so cost-conscious, do you really want to slow your lawyer down by adding yet another layer of oversight and administration for them to maintain? Writing what they’re doing into a silly interface isn’t costless. Re-typing is one of the great enemies of efficient work.