Richard Susskind of Times Online says,
Clients say that law firms are not doing enough to respond to the economic downturn. Law firms, meanwhile, say that clients are too focused on costs. These are two of the main findings of a recent study, commissioned by LexisNexis, on the state of the American legal industry.
Pricing emerges as the top issue, according to 71 per cent of the 150 in-house lawyers surveyed, and to 60 per cent of the 300 practitioners in private practice. Taking various findings together, American lawyers seem to agree that, in due course, hourly billing will be largely displaced by alternative billing structures — but not in 2010 and never entirely. Clients are keener on this shift than law firms.
I don’t know how hourly billing could ever be displaced in certain areas–family and other sorts of litigation is one that comes to mind. There is just no way to predict from the outset whether a case will take you 5 hours of work or 100 hours of work.
Furthermore a lot of how long it takes depends on the client. If they decide to be unreasonable, are determined to quibble over minor issues or need an excessive amount of handholding it will take you more time. Those kind of things need to be discouraged and costly service provided on a marginal cost basis help in that regard.
Not to say I like billable hours but there isn’t really an apparent reasonable alternatives in some areas of law.