[anonunivgrad]

Not a good article. Plenty of other professions don’t charge by the hour. How come lawyers do? This article doesn’t tell you. It doesn’t explain why the billable hour won over flat fees. There’s a whole lot of room between cartel price-fixing and billable hours. Flat fees are not illegal. Price-fixing is. If bar associations tried to set minimum hourly rates, that would be price fixing too. I’m not convinced that the writer even understands this.

[wahern]

I don't know the history, but some observations:

1) Some lawyers do sometimes charge flat fees for simple services. Indeed, even when lawyers charge by the hour, most services will be quoted as typically requiring X number of hours. In litigation it's common for lawyers to charge a fixed percentage of the recovered assets, and for it to be contingent on winning.

2) Lawyers can't guarantee outcomes. Sometimes the lawyer discovers some defect or problem that would require additional attention. Sometimes, especially in litigation or negotiation, the likelihood of achieving a particular result is a function of hours input, and even then it's continuously variable.

3) If a lawyer is losing money on a case he can't necessarily quit like the vendor of a normal service or good can and take a fixed loss. A lawyer has an ethical obligation and fiduciary duty to a client that can go far beyond that required by contract law.

[mschuster91]

> If bar associations tried to set minimum hourly rates, that would be price fixing too.

In Germany, this is the actual way how lawyers operate - anything that ends up at a civil or criminal court is billed according to the fixed set of the Rechtsanwaltsvergütungsgesetz (RVG), which means there is a base rate and a multiplier based on the monetary value of what is being argued over.

Only stuff that fully happens outside of the court system is excepted and lawyers are free to make their own negotiations.

This ensures a somewhat level playing field in front of courts.

[082349872349872]

For HN'ers coming from a common law system: the hours in court are probably also fewer, because unless the case is unusually complex, they'll only be arguing about the facts of the matter, not arguing about which precedents to apply.