If you have ever struggled with billing, found yourself at the end of a stressful, busy day, or week, with nothing on paper to show for it, you are going to learn to bill smarter, bill more efficiently and, more importantly, bill more ethically. You are going to reclaim your lost time. If you want to bill more--and we all do--this book is for you. If you are not capturing all of your billable tasks, you are losing time. If you are a law clerk, you are diminishing your likelihood for employment. If you are an associate, you are reducing your prospects for partnership. And, if you are a partner, you are not getting paid for all of the work you are performing. No matter what type of law you practice or the size of your firm, if you bill by the hour, these tips and techniques will help you learn to bill more efficiently, and spend less time documenting your time and reviewing your bills, leaving you more time to perform more billable tasks. You will also learn how to avoid block-billing, generic task entries, and task descriptions that do not meet client billing guidelines. With the second edition of The Billable Hour, you can bill more, easily and ethically, using time-tested manual timekeeping methods as well as timekeeping software new to the market. You just have to learn to document your time contemporaneously in a manner that meets client criteria. This guide will show you how. You are doing the work. I want to make sure you get paid for it.

This practical book details the economic and client service advantages of alternative law firm billing methods, the various billing methods currently available and how to select and implement the right alernative billing method for law firms of all sizes.

A noble profession is facing its defining moment. From law schools to the prestigious firms that represent the pinnacle of a legal career, a crisis is unfolding. News headlines tell part of the story—the growing oversupply of new lawyers, widespread career dissatisfaction, and spectacular implosions of pre-eminent law firms. Yet eager hordes of bright young people continue to step over each other as they seek jobs with high rates of depression, life-consuming hours, and little assurance of financial stability. The Great Recession has only worsened these trends, but correction is possible and, now, imperative. In The Lawyer Bubble, Steven J. Harper reveals how a culture of short-term thinking has blinded some of the nation’s finest minds to the long-run implications of their actions. Law school deans have ceded independent judgment to flawed U.S. News & World Report rankings criteria in the quest to maximize immediate results. Senior partners in the nation’s large law firms have focused on current profits to enhance American Lawyer rankings and individual wealth at great cost to their institutions. Yet, wiser decisions—being honest about the legal job market, revisiting the financial incentives currently driving bad behavior, eliminating the billable hour model, and more—can take the profession to a better place. A devastating indictment of the greed, shortsightedness, and dishonesty that now permeate the legal profession, this insider account is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how things went so wrong and how the profession can right itself once again.

Tweedmore & Slyde is a hot Silicon Valley law firm whose chief rainmaker has been found stabbed to death in his corner office. It falls to young associate Howard Rickover to conduct a risky "inside job" for homicide detective Sarah Nelson. Can he flush out a wily murderer -and still keep up with an associate's impossible workload?