Time really is money

Perhaps it is the inevitable mantra of middle age and beyond. Contemporary music and football are prime candidates and, even when it comes to life in general, things are not what they used to be.

Better days

The practice of the law is no exception. Convene a reunion of articled clerks from the 1960s and 1970s and, in no time, they will be regaling you with memories of those halcyon times when we managed perfectly without hourly rates and sophisticated time-recording systems. No need for the dreaded targets in those days. So much work was done that you couldn't dream of charging for and, when it came to billing, we just looked at it, felt its weight and, with the intuitive instinct of the barristers' clerk, put a figure on it.

Much of this was down to the fact that there were so many established clients and scale fees for property work. The assurance of a reasonable income from one source enabled practitioners to cross-subsidise work and the property owners plugged a gap that society had left unfilled.

Eyes on the clock

While it may have been good enough at the time, that system was bound to be outlived and the 1980s brought about our fascination with time and methods of recording it. From then on, not a letter would be written or a moment's thought given to a case without it being recorded. The old stagers complained of incompetence being rewarded at the expense of real expertise.

Inevitable it may have been in changing circumstances, but was there a price to be paid for this change? In draining off the bathwater, did we perhaps lose sight of the baby?

We see the end product of time-costing every day in the civil jurisdiction. Schedules for summary assessment and detailed bills are all extrapolated from the time record and its unit costs. Suddenly, despite one of the underlying intentions of the Woolf reforms, base costs alone in routine fast-track claims are at levels we would never have dreamt imaginable when the new regime was introduced, let alone 30 years ago. The addition of the uplift and disbursements make total bills of £15,000 commonplace.

So why is this so and does it matter?

These base costs are achievable by virtue of the letters written, calls made and time spent. What they suggest is that fee-earners spend considerable amounts of time in preparatory work '“ often upwards of 20 hours on documents alone in the most straightforward of cases.

The hallmark of any profession is its excellence. Whatever refinements are introduced to the way solicitors work and are remunerated, they must never be at the cost of that underlying excellence.

With that in mind, when two or three children suffer minor whiplash injuries as passengers in a parent's car, how is it that they all turn out to be represented by separate solicitors and why, when liability is not in issue, are costs for a modest settlement for each of them around £5,000? With all the expertise we have out there, should the preparation of a case involving two or three witnesses and a simple conflict of fact and a single medical expert, occupy the time suggested by the schedules?

This is a very real concern for the future of a profession that means so much to all of us. Each initiative seeks to address the concerns over funding of civil litigation but most of them to date have led to costs being ratcheted up even further. It simply cannot go on as it is and the answer is in our own hands.

Change with the times

What must single out the solicitor from anyone else undertaking the work is the analytical technique, the forensic ability and the focus with which each case should be prepared in a proportionate way '“ with excellence. We must change with the times, but lose our excellence and we change, perhaps forever, what we are '“ a wonderful profession with a long and noble history.

Of course we must continue to measure the work and record the time, but as the old adage has it, what matters most are not the hours we put in but what we put into the hours.