Hourly Rate, Even For Litigation, Increasingly Scarce

Litigation – long seen as the last holdout for hourly billing – is increasingly being billed with alternative methods, now that in-house  legal departments realize that “litigation isn’t all that mysterious,” Steven Greenspan, head of litigation for United Technologies’ legal department, told the Washington Post. Greenspan said his firm now typically pays a flat fee for certain phases of litigation: investigation, discovery, trial preparation, trial and – if applicable – for appeal. McKenna Long & Aldridge has spent the last year-and-a-half creating an internal software program to help predict  costs of those phases. Firms are often still comfortable with hourly rates, but a tipping point may be closer than many think.