While certainly interesting, not all the things the author paints here as sordid, unethical business practices actually are, at least to the extent that's intersubjective.

If you're doing a startup, you may want to take some lessons from the eons of microeconomics and management wisdom condensed into some of these things instead of cheering at the burning effigy of the man with the briefcase. It's a much more pithy, intuitive introduction to concepts like economies of scale and capital investment than a theoretical overview:

1. Charging for modifications to document templates instead of original forms as though original --

It is common to leverage technologies, procedures and and/or existing assets as part of a service offering. Who does anything from scratch more than 5 times before they get tired of it?

This is no different than one of us building an API or a framework so that programming tasks that used to take 20 hours can now be done in 5 hours.

In our world, that does _not_ mean you should now be billing the customer 5 hours for the same task, at least, not if you have any business sense. If you do that, you derive no economic advantage from the up-front work you put into building that framework, nor do you even make back the time (money) you spent building it. There's no incentive to do that; in that case, you're better off doing everything from scratch and billing for it.

The proper thing to do is to transmit some of the advantage of your lever into the price. If the task used to take 20 hours, now takes 5, bill the customer 15. It's cheaper for the customer and improves your competitive position while allowing you to earn a return on the up-front investment you made in developing your efficiency-enhancing technology, which can sometimes be hundreds or thousands of man-hours.

This is a form of amortisation; a fraction of the cost of the capital outlay in producing the technology is distributed into the cost basis of every application, deployment or instance. Big companies do this all the time; it's one of the key points that guides their pricing decisions on services that capitalise on internal tool chains, utilities, etc. For example, if the IT department at Nortel spent $1m building a new CRM and case management system for all the support people to use, you bet the cost of that $1m is going to be distributed into the cost of support contracts by people figuring out the bottom line. This is not only normal, but prudent.

So, while it may be deceptive to _claim_ that a document was literally prepared from scratch and bill as if it were, charging money corresponding to the literal amount of time spent on something even with the efficiency advantage of a lever you had to build is dumb. The lawyer did, at some point, have to actually build those documents; they're entitled to recoup their investment and build fat margins into it on top.

How much is a question for price competition; the market-affirming answer is, "as high as they can get away with."

2. I hand off work to peons but charge you a lawyer’s rate --

Mostly, clients do business with a law _firm_ and pay for the services of that firm as a whole, in the aggregate. This includes a cost basis consisting of overhead.

Again, to bring this back to our industry, this is no different than charging the customer $100/hr as a web design/development company, despite the fact that parts of the project might pass through a range of people with widely varying skill, credential and compensation levels. Some of these people may be internal, others outsourced, etc. Hourly billing is not a continuously variable transmission; it doesn't jump up and down depending on whose exact eyeballs are on your project at this exact moment. Compensation is for the company as a whole.

Besides, it requires up-front and residual investment to find, qualify, hire, train, and continuously employ a paralegal, assistant, clerk, etc., and there is no reason why their work on your behalf as a lawyer can't fetch much higher hourly rates than what you pay them. This is no different than the reason why project-based contractors earn more hourly than permanent employees. You want to pay $50/hr for the services of a paralegal instead of $300? Fine, then hire them on full-time at $60k (~$30/hr) + benefits yourself, and figure out how to direct their efforts and utilise their capabilities yourself.

It's $1 for the nail, $199 for knowing where to put it.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with billing a composite rate in consideration of all the time, money and expertise put into creating a firm - together with the right people, management, process and assets - that produces useful results as a cohesive whole.

Why would we hold law firms to different standards than we hold technology consultancies and service firms?

3. I hope you don’t look too closely at the expense report --

Making margin on expenses is a normal and accepted practice in many other industries; it offsets the overhead of procuring them and dealing with them, as well as a certain amount of small, but calculated risk that you won't be remunerated for expenses incurred on the client's behalf.

4. You’re always on the clock --

That's also normal across the board in professional services.

5. Your bill is only a guesstimate --

Also normal, within a reasonable margin of error.

6. I’m training junior attorneys on your dime --

How is this different from, "I'm training junior software engineers on your dime?" Normal.

...

I'm not saying lawyers don't do seedy stuff; you'll find no disagreement from me. But let's be realistic here; law firms are businesses -- it's not fair to praise everyone else's fiduciary astuteness when they do these things and vilify lawyers for them just because we all love to hate lawyers.

The presence of the particular points I mentioned above in the article basically says to me, "Law firms are so evil, look at all the business-savvy and commercially normative things they do!" This is stupid.