Alternative Fee Billing – Jeff Carr Interview

Alternative fees continue to be a prominent topic among lawyers. Our next several podcasts will feature interviews that Ed has conducted over the last 18 months with prominent thinkers on this subject.

Jeff Carr, General Counsel of FMC Technologies, responds here in the first of two interviews with him.

In today’s world, the preeminent method of billing is still based on the hour. It’s not the way that lawyers have billed traditionally. It used to be that bills were given on a bottom line for value rendered services.

Changes resulted largely by corporate counsel and insurance counsel in the 1970s, or perhaps more so in the early 80s, when people were frustrated with that kind of billing system. We went to the billable hour as a way to impose some cost control and as a way to understand the way law firms were billing us. Now of course we’ve got a whole generation of lawyers who know nothing else at this point.

Jeff Carr discusses this “new” horizon.

25 minutes, 37 seconds
6.0 MB

Categorized in: Audio & Podcasts