And here is my response to Oogali, as I lack a blog:

1. This isn’t pizza delivery: just because a lawyer has passed the bar, it doesn’t mean that they can whip up legal documents in 30 minutes or less. How “standard” is the document you’re requesting?

If it’s as standard as you think it is, then order it off LegalZoom.com and be done with it (or take said LZ document, and have your lawyer make modifications to it that fit your business situation).

I put together my first contracts by reading contract law books, BarBri material, and reviewing a variety of other contracts (both client, and vendor), and adapting it all to fit into my needs. That process took me a total of 10-12 days.

Now, using the example of my first contracts I did, take that same number, with 8 hours a day, and count the revenue I’ve lost out on by doing it myself. In the months after that, I met with various clients, who needed different legal clauses, and I spent no less than 1 day for each client, sometimes 2, making said modifications, researching them, and reviewing them.

And while my contracts always passed the client’s gauntlet of internal counsel, I never felt comfortable with it until I took it to a lawyer. You are paying for more than a document. Outsource your risk.

This is good advice for what the client should do. However, that is the client's choice. If they instead opt for the more expensive option of getting a standard document from a bricks-and-mortar law firm, for whatever host of psychological and practical reasons, that is their prerogative.

I understood the issue with template derivations to concern common documents. If the attorney provides a form document that is too generic to suit the specific requirements of an idiosyncratic business situation that truly merits a custom document, _that_ is the essential problem - call it deception, incompetence, etc. In any event, the problem there is altogether distinct from the concept of billing higher than literal time spent on template derivations.

2. Your web design analogy doesn’t apply. Law firms have different rates for partners, associates, and paralegals, and based on who works on your task, you are billed accordingly.

I did not know that. If that's in fact the case with a given firm, then billing you attorney's rates for a paralegal's work is wrong.

But again, it is wrong because that's not what they claim to do, not because it's wrong to bill out all work by all personnel out at a standard firm rate.

It may be unethical, but for a different reason than the one that appears to be given by the original author.

The partner is still 100% on the hook for any work that these folks churn out, so it better be right the first time. They don’t have unlimited time, and certainly not unlimited billing time. So any contract work that requires them to come back to and defend due to uncertainties/errors, is work they shouldn’t have done at all.

Agreed, but again, that's the attorney's problem, not because it's wrong to bill out a paralegal's work at $300/hr ipso facto.

And I’m pretty sure, the associates and paralegals don’t want to be called “peons”.

I'm pretty sure of that too. :-)

There’s an acceptable amount of margin, but even then, it’s not really margin. A copy doesn’t cost 5 cents. A copy costs man-hours to a) interrupt your existing train of thought, b) go to the copier, c) make said copies, d) potentially troubleshoot why the copier doesn’t work and correct it or find and alternative, e) collect copies, f) resume work.

Think about the cost of “context switching” next time you say you can make copies cheaper than the next person.

Strongly agreed. All the more reason to mark up the hard costs or charge a separate service fee for the end result of utilising the product.

Continue to look at it from a consulting/professional services view. Sure your client may call you up with some basic questions, and you can answer them no problem, but once the questions start getting complex, you start to get a little uneasy with giving them something valuable for nothing in return.

Personally, I give away a great deal of free advice, consultation and general communication to my clients.

But I don't fault someone else for being a little more practically minded than I about these things.

Your bill should not be a guesstimate. Everyone, and I mean, everyone is required to record the number of hours they spent on a task or project. IT consultants do it, and lawyers do it. No exceptions.

It should rather closely reflect actual time spent in the grand scheme of things, but there is an allowable margin of error and rounding, especially considering the impracticality of accounting for a few minutes here and a few minutes there in the context of human task switching.