Clients Do Not Pay You For Your Time

An incredibly important skill to possess as a lawyer is to remain grounded enough that you can look at issues from the perspective of the client.

Many of us live and die by the billable hour. You might use a dedicated automated computer-based application that tracks work activity. Maybe you use the timekeeping feature built into your case management software. Or perhaps you just use the trusty Ypad (my preferred option). Regardless, lawyers begin to divvy the day up into .1 increments.

Tracking time becomes a dominant mode of thinking. It’s how your firm measures your productivity and effectiveness. You’ve got to meet your billable requirements to remain employed and make your bonuses. You start to look for time, where can you drum up more billable work. Review the file to see if there is something you missed. Scour your inbox. Looking for something, anything you can do to bill some time.

Yet, as Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt famously put it, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

Clients don’t hire lawyers so they can pay for their time. Clients hire lawyers because they have a problem and they want it solved. How that problem is best solved is up to the lawyer. The client came to you because they need expert, professional advice. Maybe they need a will for themselves, or their business needs a new licensing agreement, or their son was arrested for a DUI.

To a lawyer, these things seem like billable work to be done. For the client, these things are stress-inducing headaches that they wish they could avoid.

Shifting Perspectives

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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A few years ago, I wrote about getting peed on by my son:

I was peed on for the first time in my life today. My nearly two-year old son – if anyone was going to do it, I’m glad it was him. It’s probably more of a surprise that I’ve managed to go this long without it happening. It’s just one of those things that comes with being a parent. There’s probably no way of getting around it.
It’s funny how perspective works. In any other situation, getting peed on would make me furious. But when it’s your child, you just look down and say: “Oh.” Then laugh. Well, I laughed. Maybe other people would be upset but I couldn’t help but laugh. My son looked at me and said: “Dada, uh oh.” I just nodded my head and said, “Yes. Uh oh.”

Because I was with my son, because I’m his father and he is my responsibility, I was able to take getting peed on in stride. At this point, I could probably take it in stride from any toddler if I was helping them. Becoming a parent changes how you think and relate to children. You recognize your role in caring and nurturing them. But go back to the time before I was a parent? If some child peed on me as above, I probably would have freaked out and dropped the child. Only once I became a parent was I able to have the perspective I now possess.

As lawyers, we can often become enmeshed in the practice. It can be easy to get so deep into being a lawyer that you can forget what it means to not “think like a lawyer.”

An incredibly important skill to possess as a lawyer is to remain grounded enough that you can look at issues from the perspective of the client. Lawyers are often apt to think of the law — the drill. How to use it, apply it, and make it work in any particular situation. But a client does not really care about the law; they care about the solution to their problem — the quarter-inch hole.

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Clients do not care about the fine details or subtle nuances of case law or code sections. They are not concerned about the clever timing of your motion work or other “inside baseball” shop talk. All clients see are their problems. They’re being sued, facing incarceration, in need of a prenuptial agreement. Your approach to these problems is largely inconsequential. What clients want are effective, efficient solutions to their problems. Whether to pursue litigation, draft a contract, or perhaps just make a phone call or write a letter, it is a lawyer’s job to know which is needed and to explain it in terms the client can understand.

That’s what clients pay you for.


Keith Lee practices law at Hamer Law Group, LLC in Birmingham, Alabama. He writes about professional development, the law, the universe, and everything at Associate’s Mind. He is also the author of The Marble and The Sculptor: From Law School To Law Practice (affiliate link), published by the ABA. You can reach him at keith.lee@hamerlawgroup.com or on Twitter at @associatesmind.