For the things I regret about leaving tax practice file: Lawyers Gear Up Grand New Fees; Hourly Rates Increasingly Hit $1,000, Breaching a Level Once Seen as Taboo, by Nathan Koppel, in today’s Wall Street Journal:
The hourly rates of the country’s top lawyers are increasingly coming with something new — a comma. A few attorneys crossed into $1,000-per-hour billing before this year, but recent moves to the four-figure mark in New York, which sets trends for legal markets around the country, are seen as a significant turning point. …
"We have viewed $1,000 an hour as a possible vomit point for clients," says a partner at a New York firm. "Frankly, it’s a little hard to think about anyone who doesn’t save lives being worth this much money," says David Boies, one of the nation’s best-known trial lawyers, at the Armonk, N.Y., office of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP. …
Clients are often most cost-conscious about junior attorneys, believing they provide less value-per-dollar than senior counsel. Considering a major-league baseball player can make the equivalent of $15,000 per hour, "$1,000 for very seasoned lawyers who can solve complex problems doesn’t seem to be inappropriate," says Mike Dillon, the general counsel of Sun Microsystems Inc.
For more, see:
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Legal Profession Blog:
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$1,000-Per-Hour, by Jeff Lipshaw
- $1,000/Hour? Nero Has Become Managing Partner and Is Fiddling Away…, Nancy Rapoport
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WSJ’s Law Blog, The Law Blog Thousand-Dollar Bar, by Peter Lattman
The comments are open if anyone knows of a tax lawyer charging $1,000 per hour!
Update: In unrelated news, from Jurist:
Lawyers in Kenya are now ranked as the ninth most corrupt group in the country, according to the Kenya Bribery Index 2007, a report released Tuesday by Transparency International. The annual Kenya Bribery Index has never in its previous five years of publication listed lawyers as top solicitors of bribes in Kenya.
[Hat Tip: Ben Cunningham.]
