Microsoft wants to end the tyranny of lawyers billing by the hour | Latest News

If you are a lawyer, or if you have ever spent more than 10 minutes talking to one, you know everything about the accident in the calculation hours.

According to a typical agreement, the lawyers of customer accounts all the time spent in your case. Correspondence letters, searching for wealth, depositing testimonials, phone calls - the meter always begins, and customers can expect to see all this in the account at the end.

But the rate per hour is really bad. Because many tasks have less time than that, companies often demand that lawyers count on six increments of one minute. Lawyers hate the system, because they have to count every six minutes of their blocks of time. Customers hate it, because each task, no matter how short, rounded off at six minutes, by inflating the costs. (In the company of $ 1,000 per hour, sending a text for 30 seconds can cost the client $ 100.) And although the company can benefit from this, the system calls for additional problems with customers through the billing , Which can strengthen relationships quickly.


One of the largest US companies want to pay bills under a lot of legislation. Microsoft, which spends hundreds of millions of dollars in a lawsuit, plans to eliminate the timetable for most of its legal requirements. The software giant plans to take over 90% of your legal process needs based on conclusions or alternative payments per hour within two years, the New York Times (pay wall). This could represent a significant change in company law, which currently has about 16% of its income through alternative payable hours as a lump sum per project.

Microsoft hopes that a new form of payment will encourage greater cooperation between businesses and external legal advisers. "We want to create a situation that encourages our lawyers to establish a telephone service - without bureaucracy or worry about how to pay for it - and talk to the law firm in everything that's needed," said David Howard, deputy Microsoft spokesman, Times.

Fourteen companies working for Microsoft, including K & L Gates, partly under the name of former partner William Gates, founder of Microsoft - have agreed on a change.