Clients clamor for alternatives to hourly rate billing because they want lawyers to have an incentive stake in the outcome of a matter. This is the case with contingency fees, where lawyers get a flat percentage of the value earned for the client. Contingency fees are often used in litigation, from personal injury cases to high-stakes corporate disputes.

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Building rapport and maintaining constant communication are the keys to sustaining a healthy business relationship between in-house and outside counsel, panelists said at Lawyers Weekly's Business and Law Breakfast Wednesday. About 40 people gathered at the Marriott City Center hotel in downtown Raleigh as panelists Jay Campbell, executive director of the N.C. Board of Pharmacy; Ken Hammer, general counsel and vice president of corporate governance at DataFlux Corp.; and Jeff Miller, vice president, general counsel and secretary of Highwoods Properties discussed the most effective ways for outside firms to attract in-house business.

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In a recent article, I asked whether the billable hour method of billing clients is dead or on life support. It turns out that there is a third option: Hibernation. A recent survey reported that almost 73 percent of 2009 outside counsel fees were based on arrangements other than the standard hourly rate, up from 66 percent the year before. It is clear that law firms are scrambling with deals to retain clients. But is it also an inescapable conclusion from the survey that law firms are moving away from the standard hourly rate?

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By DIANA SMITH, Staff Writer [email protected]  John A. Zaloom is an attorney in Moore & Van Allen’s Research Triangle Park office, where he focuses his practice on employment law. Zaloom received his undergraduate degree from Texas A&M University in 1991. ...

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By ED POLL, Special to Lawyers Weekly [email protected] One consistent theme to come out of the Great Recession is that the billable hour, if not dead, is dying as a metric of measuring law firm performance. The Association of Corporate ...

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I recently spoke with an executive whose company makes software to help lawyers record billable time. He discussed failure to record time as a "time leak," because time is lost (and therefore not billed) when an attorney fails to make contemporaneous notations of work being done. Surveys done by the company suggest that at least one in five timekeepers consistently fails to record time contemporaneously, and almost 80 percent record their time days or even weeks later.

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