The Ten Commandments (of Billing)

As an exercise for my ethics class, I had each student write down his or her top ten commandments of billing.  My hope was that the students would both learn these rules and have them in a nice, easy place to find and print once they start practice. As the Ten Commandments was on this past weekend, it seemed appropriate to post the top ten commandments from the class.

1.  Thou Shall Keep Track of One’s Time, Whilst Not Waiting Until the End of the Month to Write Them Down.

2.  Thou Shall Scribble Thy Fees on Papyrus and Present Them to Thy Client

3.  Thou Shall Not Overbill, Nor Double Bill, Nor any Multiples Thereof

4.  Thou Shall Not Bill Your Client for an Hour of Work Because You Thought About the Case for Two Minutes in the Shower

5.  Thou Shall Not Runneth The Meter for Additional Billing Hours

6.  Thou Shall Not Wing It; Thou Shall Have and Hold to Thy Billing Guidelines

7.  Thou Shall Not Recycle Thy Work as if It Had Been Born Anew

8.  Thou Shall Return Thy Clients’ Phone Calls

9.  Thou Shall Not Sue Thy Clients for Unpaid Bills (Unless You Want to be Countersued for Malpractice)

10.  Thou Shall Not Sell Thy Soul to a Firm with Billing Requirements that Do Not Meet Thy Personal Expectations for a Work and Family Balance

Are we missing any of your favorite commandments?  What else should we make sure our students think about in order to avoid the messiest of conflicts, those with clients?

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International Media & Conflict Resolution Conference Update: Media Files Now Available

Our media files from the Conference, including pictures and webcasts of the presentations, are now available. Click here for access to the pictures, videotapes, and podcasts.  The written products of the Conference are expected to appear in the fall issue of the Marquette Law Review.  (My earlier post on Conference highlights is here.)

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Fame v. Accuracy in Persuasion

Columnists in both the New York Times and Newsweek in the last few weeks have discussed how often we tend to be persuaded by people who are just plain wrong.  And, as a follow-up to our media and conflict resolution conference last week, it was interesting to realize what part the media plays in helping the wrong people to continually have outlets for their mistaken predications.  As Sharon Begley wrote:

Pointing out how often pundits’ predictions are not only wrong but egregiously wrong — a 36,000 Dow! euphoric Iraqis welcoming American soldiers with flowers! — is like shooting fish in a barrel, except in this case the fish refuse to die. No matter how often they miss the mark, pundits just won’t shut up. . . . The fact that being chronically, 180-degrees wrong does not disqualify pundits is in large part the media’s fault: cable news, talk radio and the blogosphere need all the punditry they can rustle up, track records be damned. But while we can’t shut pundits up, we can identify those more likely to have an accurate crystal ball when it comes to forecasts from the effect of the stimulus bill to the likelihood of civil unrest in China. Knowing who’s likely to be right comes down to something psychologists call cognitive style, and with that in mind Philip Tetlock, a research psychologist at Stanford University, would like to introduce you to foxes and hedgehogs.

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