More on ROWE

Cali and Jody’s ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment) blog – which hits dead-on so many of the inanities of our clock and face-time obsessed workplace culture – has a recent post regarding attorney billable hours, and the fact that clients are driving the push to rid the delivery of legal services from this archaic model.

Now, I’m sure most of these clients aren’t living the ROWE ideal, but at least there is a recognition that the results provided by legal services are not always – or even most of the time – linked to the time it takes to produce them. I spent less than three years working in a billable hours environment before entering the corporate world, but I hated it from the first. Ironically, part of the problem was the clients themselves, who had no problem paying for endless hours spent summarizing depositions or twiddling one’s thumbs in a courtroom status conference but would balk at time billed for conferences between the firm’s attorneys, to say nothing of paying on a sliding scale based on results.