Uh oh. I just drove the first nail into the flat-fee coffin.
When I laid out the dominoes, the fourth was hourly estimates for legal work, and what it costs you, getting tight enough that the flat fee would have nothing left to sell.
A bot reads my inbox every hour and turns what I owe people into Clio tasks. For every contract request, redline, or entity formation suite, Claude works out how many hours it’ll take and writes it into the task before I’ve logged in, off a rate table in minutes per page per pass built from my time entries.
That’s right. A data-backed estimate, down to the tenth of an hour.
When the task closes it works out what the work really took and writes the error next to the prediction. Every week it tells me the average miss and how often I landed inside twenty-five percent. I’ll publish the delta as actuals land, for better or worse.
For the first time ever (AFAIK), the client can get that number in advance.
Your lawyer probably estimates off old timecards and guesswork, or a conclusive “Trust me, bro.”
Soon (very soon), you will no longer have to trust them, bro.
Peddlers of the flat fee sell price certainty against the purported ‘risk’ of an overage. That’s it. You pay more than the work costs, and the premium buys the right to stop wondering, which only works while nobody can check how long the work takes.
But your lawyer knows. At the very least, they know the work will usually cost less than the flat fee they’re charging you.
It’s sold as a courtesy. It’s a bet, and the house sets the line. The number is priced off the version of your matter that goes sideways, and most don’t, so you pay the bad-day price on a good day and never see the difference. Read the scope too. Step outside it and you’re back on the clock, so the certainty vanishes when something unusual happens, the only time you needed it.
Production cost fell. On an hourly bill that gain reaches you automatically, because fewer hours is a smaller invoice. On a flat fee it reaches the firm and goes to a partner’s new townhome, and the rebrand to “value billing” arrived about when the hour started swinging your way.
A flat fee can’t correct itself. An hourly bill shrinks on its own. A flat fee is one number, set in advance, and the only way it absorbs a drop in cost is if the firm cuts it. Go ask the private equity fund that just bought in how it feels about that. They can’t cut. The spread is why they invested.
So the price sits frozen while the cost underneath falls and your view sharpens, and a gap like that doesn’t close quietly, it widens in plain view until every flat fee gets re-read as an overcharge. I don’t know if that takes two years or five. This isn’t the flat fee losing to a better competitor. It’s the flat fee running out of the only thing it ever sold, with its investors on the brake.
Clack clack clackity clack. (See the dominoes post.)
Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Not legal advice.
