That's incredible how much a lawyer's hourly rate is. A senior partner >$1000/hour? It's amazing how expensive risk reduction services are that, in my mind, equate to a blame shifting strategy.
In court cases where hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars are on the line, it makes sense to pay the lawyer who is 1% better even if he or she costs %100 more.
Anyway. You won't be hiring the $1000/hr lawyer. For almost all the stuff that startups need to get done, a lawyer who charges in the sub-500 range is going to get it done and done well.
Don't let sticker shock fool you. Lawyers provide an essential service. It would be nice if we didn't need them. It would also be nice to get free unicorns and backrubs from models. Too bad, that's not the world we live in.
I've been both a lawyer and a programmer, and I've observed something: Lawyers will shock you with their hourly rate. Programmers will shock you with how many hours they log.
Do you actually know a web firm anywhere that will charge $1000/hour? Such a rate is unheard of in software consulting as far as I know. Maybe someone like EDS who has huge public companies in their pockets will charge these rates, but I personally have never encountered it and I don't know anyone who charges it.
The most expensive software consulting I've seen in the wild is $350/hr, and that was for a very specific niche. I know other very specific niche service providers who charge $200/hr.
As I've said previously, I think the fact that most other professionals max out around the rate that the cheapest and least experienced lawyers start shows there's something perverse with the law industry.
> Such a rate is unheard of in software consulting as far as I know.
$1000 is not unheard of at all. Yes, you're right, the likes of EDS, IBM, Accenture, etc. are easily charging the upwards of $1k/day. But any decently sized firm (50+ employees) is going to charge roughly that amount. You'd be shocked to hear some of the price tags on corporate website development...
I think this is the overall point. Go for a small specialist who will treat you like a king/queen. You don't need a corporate law firm. There are too many transaction costs that you simply don't need (assuming you're small) or can risk accept not having.
>Yes, you're right, the likes of EDS, IBM, Accenture, etc. are easily charging the upwards of $1k/day.
I said $1k PER HOUR, not per day.
I'd like to know of software consultancies that charge that much money per hour, excepting the typical fleecing when your deals are built on backroom backscratches like you'd find with the public companies served by EDS et al.
Percona has over fifty employees and they charge $350/hr for standard services and $450/hr for premium service. You only go to Percona if you have a very, very specific MySQL problem that needs to be resolved, and the staff at Percona is populated with as many major MySQL players as are willing. They definitely represent the big guns, when you really, really need your MySQL stuff fixed ASAP and can't fiddle around with people who aren't core MySQL developers, the people who invented the system. They are the top of the line in their niche, and they charge as much as a fresh-from-college lawyer.
A normal, generic consultancy will charge between $100/hr-$200/hr and often their employees aren't anything to sneeze at either, they're just less specialized and therefore have a less compelling case for such high rates. I know of no one in the realm of standard or even most niche commercial software consultancy that rakes in $1000/hr+.
If you know such a company, I'd like to learn their strategy so that I can start charging that much.
First of all, that $1k per hour was pulled out of my ass. That was my piss-poor attempt at using humour to point out that people tend to underestimate someone else's value just because we don't understand their profession. I'm pretty sure a lawyer's work involves more than "blame-shifting".
Secondly, $1000/hour works out to about $240,000 per month. It's a high figure, but I have worked on a 3-month project that cost the client $1,000,000 before. Granted it wasn't a 1-man job, and God only knows I didn't get to see much of that money, but still, that was how much the client was billed for.
You're comparing apples and oranges. A lawyer working with small clients doesn't have nearly the ability to bill hours as a software consultant. Our specialized software consultants would bill 50 hours a week for months at a stretch. 50 hours might be all the legal work a lawyer does for a client in a whole year. The price of that fact is baked into the hourly rate.
don't forget that the hourly rate has to also cover office space rent, paralegals, secretaries, utilities and all the other incidental costs of doing business. Though I bet that most of that $1000/hour still goes to the lawyer.
Anyway. You won't be hiring the $1000/hr lawyer. For almost all the stuff that startups need to get done, a lawyer who charges in the sub-500 range is going to get it done and done well.
Don't let sticker shock fool you. Lawyers provide an essential service. It would be nice if we didn't need them. It would also be nice to get free unicorns and backrubs from models. Too bad, that's not the world we live in.