It's, frankly, pretty easy for a law firm to pump up their billable hours.

"Document review" is something law firms can dump thousands of manhours into with no real appreciable change in outcome. It ends up being more a question of what a company/individual is willing to pay.

The reason big lawfirms stay in business isn't because they generally get much better results, but rather it's because they have the time and manpower to chase down every single rabbit hole to fully understand the law around the cases they are working. So, instead of a firm giving you a "We are 95% sure the law is this way" with a bigger firm you get "We are 99% sure the law is this way."

The other messed up part of the US legal system is the bigger the law firm, the more time they have to chase down discovery rabbit holes looking for wins and (potentially) legally bankrupting their opponents. "Document A references document B written by Foo? Well, lets have a deposition of Foo and a request for Document B". It ends up looking a lot like refactoring spaghetti code in a dynamically typed language.

The finalizing Depp vs. Herd trial is good example what happens when both sides have stupid amounts of money to burn... 6 weeks in court for civil matter, and it probably would have been even longer. With seemingly hours and hours of depositions, stupid numbers of evidence and transcripts...

you have to wonder how much of that content is actually retained by the jurors. I always make a good faith effort to pay attention when I am selected, but I have a hard time remembering exactly what was said after a mere three days, let alone six weeks. in a criminal case, I suppose that works in favor of the defense (at least ideally). I have no idea what it does in a civil case.

Being on a jury was one of the few times in life when taking notes paid off for me, mostly to correct the memory of other jurors! oddly some judges don’t allow it.

I was allowed to take notes, but I was not permitted to bring them with me during the deliberations. Were you allowed to look at your notes, and share them, during the entire process?

They let me use them in deliberation, but took them at the end of the trial. The judge did specifically mention at some point that notes aren't the equivalent to a transcript.

I have, and many besides, billed every last penny on the basis of "what I may miss I still understand better than anyone else". My 0.01% failures are 100% of my proposition.

It's an opaque field how's a client supposed to know this particular law firm is billing less hours than another would because they're using this software? Can't run the suit twice with two different firms blind to see which bills less hours.

You look at the firms track records, testimonials, results; etc., the same way you evaluate most purchases. If two firms have similar results and one is cheaper, then you choose the cheaper option.

Again you'll know very little about the details of how much discovery and how complex that was in any particular case.

What do you mean you know very little? You would interview the firm and ask them what the discovery process was like. You likely wouldn’t care about the gritty details of how they sorted the documents. More important would be the scale of the discovery, the outcome of the case, and the cost. Unless there was literally only one firm handling this specific type of issue, then it will always be possible to compete on cost.

That assumes buyers are able to properly price shop, and can discover a law firm that is more efficient. Much rarer than one would assume.

I do not know what “properly” price shop means, but I do not think law firms get blank checks. Buyers themselves are frequently lawyers so they are not completely out of the loop on what is and is not reasonable.

'Properly' price shop means that a client would be able to evaluate quality/price across a wide variety of firms in a transparent fashion relatively easily. Say with a week or two of work.

That is impossible because the quality of work for a lawyer is very, very difficult to gauge, and it may take years (or decades) for bad work to be visible in many cases (say missing some bad edge cases in contract language, or they can't handle in litigation in certain types of cases, or the like).

And other lawyers have little incentive to price shop either, as they usually get to add on a little on top when they farm out the work. Cost-plus, essentially.

And if 'very expensive and opaque' is the norm, it's not like 'very expensive and opaque' is unreasonable.

I don't think that works here. When getting a lawyer you are more interested in outcomes than price and we are probably not talking 100x but more like low to mid double digit percent. Important enough for the lawfirm in control of their price, but nothing the clients can really select for, especially since he is at a information disadvantage.

>"A buyer is going to prefer a law firm that minimizes expenses."

Yes, but I feel like this only works up to a certain point. There is absolutely a sense that high caliber attorneys charge more and getting a "cheap lawyer" instinctively sounds like you're setting yourself up to fail - despite the fact that the lower price firm is probably just as apt as the firm with the brand recognition.