On The Clock: Payment Using Hourly Billing

This is one of a series of posts describing different fee arrangements offered by attorneys.

Hourly billing is the most common arrangement that you will encounter in your experience with lawyers. Lawyers will often quote you their hourly rate, just like you’ll see in a lot of other professions, specifically because it gives them an easy way to measure how much they have put into a case, and therefore how much they want to bill you.

Hourly billing is usually done in tenths or quarters of an hour. What this means is that the lawyers marks off the time they spend on your case, rounding up to the nearest 6 minutes (tenth) or 15 minutes (quarter). You can imagine if you have a lawyer billing in quarter-hour increments that any phone messages they leave will be very expensive! Every time the lawyer has to devote themselves anew to your case, you will be billed at least one of these increments.
The good thing about hourly billing is that you can control it if you are able to focus your lawyer’s attention on many things at once, rather than one thing at a time spread out over a period of days or weeks. You also get very good records as to what the lawyer has done and how long it takes. The bad thing is that everything the lawyer does, more times than not, will cost you money. Also, if you have a matter that requires a lot of the lawyer’s time, you may find yourself paying more than you would for other methods.