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A comment on California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to Pass. Parent comment

Re:California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to... by JumpCrisscross on Friday July 14, 2017 @05:33PM (#14773381)
Comparing New York City to the Bay Area in terms of final bill, not hourly rates. Certainly not true across the board, but when I compared the cost to do the same task (e.g. set up and manage an SPV, or paper a simple merger) between Wilson and Latham, on one hand, and Cravath or Greenberg, on the other hand, I found a consistent 30 to 45% premium for California. A lot of this came from having to list out, section by section, bodies of California's commercial code everyone was agreeing to ignore.

Note that the bills with these same firms reach parity with New York the moment I insist we use Delaware or New York law.

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Re:California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to... by brianwawok on Friday July 14, 2017 @09:26PM (#14774530)
I fail to see why listing out a larger legal document should be 30-45% premium.

That is like saying

"Because I wrote this code in Java instead of Go, it cost about 40% more (I had to generate all the getters and setters, added up to 40% more lines of code)"

Legal documents are the highest level copy and paste from previous legal documents. In the same way many code is glue some libraries together, but worse (i.e. more reuse).

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Re:California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to... by gnicholas on Friday July 14, 2017 @05:55PM (#14773503)
Thanks for clarifying. I don't know anyone who uses Greenberg in the SF area, and I'm shocked that they would be pricier than Cravath. I can believe that Latham NY might be less than Wilson, just because Latham is more commoditized than Wilson in terms of branding.

There may also be swings in "rack rate" because (1) the partner you are talking to at one firm is hungry and therefore will discount; or (2) some firms discount up front but then hold fast, whereas other firms are more receptive to discounting the bill at the end of the day.

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Re:California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to... by JumpCrisscross on Friday July 14, 2017 @06:42PM (#14773788)
Discounts are a huge part of it. That said, I typically try to box legal bills in advance for everything except litigation. For the avoidance of doubt, I give both coasts the same budget. Guess which side's lawyers love running right through it (or approaching it to within 5¢).
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