Thank you for taking your valuable time to review my blog posting.  Because I have joined another firm, Schmidt & Schmidt, S.C., I will be posting future content to a new blog entitled, “Law Prints.”  The content and style will mirror that of Legal Locutions.  I invite you visit Law Prints right now, or later at your convenience.

Outsourcing has become easier with modern technologies like the Internet.  I suspect outsourcing will become even more popular as businesses seek greater efficiency and as professional services become more specialized.

If you are a business handling confidential client information, outsourcing comes with risks and responsibilities.  The risks are fairly obvious.  Sensitive information in the hands of third parties presents opportunities for identity theft, fraud, and other illegal or unseemly activities.  In many cases, you cannot closely monitor third party activities or easily hold them accountable for mishandling information or breaking confidences.

Such risks probably do not outweigh the benefits of outsourcing, but they should perhaps inspire your adhesion to policies and procedures designed to minimize them.  For example, maybe all your clients should know about and give explicit written consent to your outsourcing, even if your outsourcing seems like a commonplace, obvious, or implied part of the service being offered.  Although you may have good relations with your third-party vendors, keep in mind that the good relations are yours, not your clients’.  Even if you regularly outsource to a firm which you know and trust and which has its own professional responsibilities, your clients may have personal reasons for avoiding contact with your vendors of first choice.

You may also wish to formally evaluate the credibility of third-party vendors you hire to perform outsourced work, perhaps maintaining a list of credentials for being eligible to handle confidential information.  Explaining these concerns to your clients, and the steps you’ve taken to mitigate them, will inspire confidence in your services.

It seems like everyone of repute is down on the billable hour.  Some professionals are openly critical of it, while others remain silent while continuing to count them.  Perhaps some who persist in billing by the hour feel, as I do, that there are no better billing methods available for the kind of work they do.

Not that everyone should always bill by the hour.  Flat fees are appropriate where the nature and extent of the work required to complete a project are known with reasonable certainty.  If you expect to work on and complete a high volume of small projects, predictability with respect to the amount of work required on any given project is not even that important.  In this case, relatively small amounts of money are at stake, quoting flat fees is the most efficient billing strategy, and the average profit per matter is the true measure of financial success.

Unfortunately, much of our work as professionals cannot be accurately forecasted, which means among other things that many of the matters we work on require considerably more than a few hours of our time.  If the projects we attend to are few in number but large in scope, average profit per project cannot be relied upon: what we charge for completing a project must accurately reflect how much bona fide effort went into its completion.  How else can we practicably measure this effort except by units of time reported after the fact?

I understand that the billable hour shifts risk disproportionately to customers and that the poor economy has inspired customers to demand predictability.  To the extent such customers want flat fees for an inherently unpredictable amount of work, they are asking us to shift the risk of unpredictability back to ourselves.

If the market pressures me to quote flat fees for amounts of work I cannot accurately predict, only occasionally will I have billed the proper amount.  Most of the time, the billing arrangement will have favored either me or the customer.  Although the arrangement was presumably the result of fair bargaining, the exchange will not seem to be fair in hindsight.

Ideally, the customer and the professional would agree to share equally the risk of the unknown.  Flat fees prevent such equality, but must the billable hour?  Is there a way to employ hourly billing which places equal burdens on the professional and the customer?  If so, the burden on the customer might remain what it has always been, namely, to risk paying the extra costs of completing projects that are inherently ill-defined.  The burden on the professional might be to keep the customer truly well-informed about work performed and the constantly changing landscape of the project.

Keeping customers well-informed requires that we professionals have our priorities straight and know how to effectively communicate what we do, what we recommend, and why.  This is not easy.  I would like to see more written about the interplay between good communication and the successful use of hourly billing.

Can we remain at leisure while being at work?  Joan M Burda, an attorney and small business owner, seems to think so in her editorial column published in the latest issue of GPSolo.  Speaking for herself, she remarks that leisure refers to her lack of haste, not lack of work.

Because most of us would contrast leisure and work, to marry the concepts might seem bizarre.  On the other hand, for attorneys and small business owners – some of the busiest people around – reconciling leisure and work as an integral whole may be the best hope for setting aside the tug-of-war between them.

Sometimes we should do nothing – call it being lazy, if you will.  Like absolute silence, doing nothing may be unnerving, but it is invaluable.  Al Gini has a book on the importance of being lazy which I have yet to read.

But suppose leisure does not mean being lazy but just refusing to adopt the mentality of haste and busyness, denying our work schedules the ability to own us.  Suppose we think of leisure as a state of mind which is the product of good self-management.

I suspect we want and need to be busy, which is all the more reason to reconcile work and leisure.  Yet some of us stay busy hoping to avoid making tough choices, such as whether to relate to people (including ourselves) or to merely please them.  It may actually be easier to live hectically if by doing so we feel sheltered from the threat of options.  This feeling is of course an illusion but explains why we perceive work and leisure as rivals.

Maybe working with leisure takes real guts.