(Still )Rethinking Lawyer’s Bills

The more things change, the more they stay the same…

In 2011, I published a blog post (that’s since evaporated) about how most lawyer’s bills sucked — though I probably used a kinder term then — because they were unreadable and didn’t give clients actionable information beyond “Here’s what we did, here’s how long it took, and here’s how much you owe us.”

In that post, I took a crack at designing a better bill that was easier to read and included information clients might actually value like a summary of the last month’s action, a list of upcoming deadlines and events, an introduction and contact information (beyond the three-letter initials) of the entire legal team working on the case, and even a report card for the client to send back in with their payment.

In the last few weeks a few folks have asked me if I still have the original around and if they I could share it again because (shocker) lawyer’s bills still suck.

Well, here it is in all its 2011 glory. And if it’s not obvious, all the data and information is made up. I’m not a practicing attorney any more and there’s no Johnson vs. Memorial Hospital case.

Let me know what you think!

Here’s a dropbox link to the original .pdf.