The word "billable" is a correct and usable term in written English.
You can use it when referring to services or tasks for which a client can be charged (billed). For example, "The company charged the client for all of the billable hours worked on the project."
Few managing partners know their firm's profit per billable hour, even though that is the main product law firms sell.
Whatever it turns out to be, the billable hour's replacement must be easy to use and must strike a compromise between clarity for the client and profits for the law firm.
But clients complain that this practice values the quantity of hours billed over quality and encourages padding.If the billable hour does perish, it will be at the hands of the clients, rather than the private-practice lawyers themselves.
Everyone wins (including Basha, which Mr Roland says has grown by between 15% and 20% a year for more than a decade).More and more firms' in-house lawyers, who typically hire and manage outside lawyers, have turned to alternatives to the billable hour since the beginning of the global recession in 2008.
If this catches on, it will spell the end of the billable hour.At the annual gathering of the advertising industry in Cannes at the end of June, all the talk was of the accelerating shift away from established forms of advertising, especially the 30-second commercial, towards newfangled social media.
But they are seeking to build broader practices in under-lawyered emerging markets where the international law firms do not have a presence but the accountants do.Kill billable hoursFor now the Big Four seem content with stealthy growth.
Chinese clients are even more accustomed than American ones to asking for alternatives to the lucrative billable hour.
Those lawyers who felt dirtier about networking had fewer billable hours to their credit; but the more senior the lawyer, the less likely he was to report feeling dirty.
They are run by lawyers, not professional managers, insist on charging by the "billable hour" rather than by results and use little technology more advanced than e-mail.
Since there is clearly a demand for an alternative to the billable hour, you would expect someone to supply it.
The company has around 10,000 engineers working on higher-end design and development for big global technology firms, but a handful of bright people are assigned to working on Wipro's own R&D, not billable to clients.
