Estimating Your Time

This is for those of you who are about to accept a matter in an area of law in which you are not intimately familiar.

“How long will this take?” and “how much do you think this will cost?” are two questions that clients love to ask. We attorneys do not like to answer those questions. Oh, we may respond to those questions (“I don’t know what it cost you because I don’t know what the other lawyer will do...”). Perfectly true and a valid response, but it doesn’t answer them. The answers lay in your knowledge of what to expect, and if you don’t know what to expect, you can’t answer the questions. (In the meantime, we’ll assume that your response satisfied your client, and she’s left your office, happy and secure in your ability to help her.)

Only two ways to get an idea on how much time it will take to handle a case: ask a fellow practitioner, or handle a case and learn by trial and error. Let’s look briefly at the pros and cons of each:

1. Ask a fellow practitioner. Nothing beats good advice from a pro, so this is a great idea. Make sure, though, that you ask the right questions. For example, suppose you are a true sole practitioner (no paralegal, no legal assistant, etc.) and you are about to take on your first child support modification case. How much time is it going to take to get to a hearing or mediation? If you ask that question of your helpful fellow attorney who has been practicing for 20 years with the same paralegal and who has 2 legal assistants, I suspect you are going to get an answer that will mislead you (to the attorney, it takes not much time at all. He’s not assembling discovery items and preparing the stock responses). The better question might be “if you had to do all of the work yourself, how much time do you think it would take you to get to mediation?” Second, the fellow practitioner may well be the adversary in the not-to-distant future. “Rookie” questions may signal a weakness that the adversary will seek to exploit.

2. Trial and error. Keeping this in context, not a bad way to learn the ropes. You learn how long you need to handle a case. You work the case as you see fit with the facts and conditions as you find them, without an artificial time limit getting in the way (“Fellow Practitioner said it should take me no more than an hour to draft responses to interrogatories, and it’s taken me two hours already! What am I doing wrong?”). You don’t need that kind of pressure – you have enough already. You probably cannot ethically bill for all that time, though.

Having a good idea of the time you will need to handle a client’s matter will make it easier on you to schedule your work and give you added confidence with your client.

-----Barry