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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Professional Firm E-Mail Fees Can Be Controlled

While many people lament the cost of e-mails in terms of the amount of time they can take and the legal dangers they can harbor, we have discovered another cost , the real out-of-pocket dollars involved in dealing with professionals who charge by the hour. One of our companies recently became engaged in a dispute with another organization. When the first invoice from our attorney arrived, I was stunned. It showed that bits of various hours on various days , amounting to 30 percent of the total effort , involved handling e-mails. But I couldn’t tell whether the lawyer was just reading what others were sending or initiating something himself , or both. It didn’t matter. When his hourly fee is parsed into tenths of an hour, real money gets committed for someone just to say thank you. The lawyer working on our case is charging $455 per hour , that’s $45.50 for a minimum of six minutes , whether an item takes one minute or five. Just the time required to open an e-mail, click on a spam filter question, read the message, download a document if attached, open that document, consider its contents along with the e-mail itself, and then figure out who should be copied on the reply, can amount to some serious money , and nothing of substance would have been generated. Multiply the cost of those ministerial minutes by the number of e-mails per day that flow back and forth among various parties involved in the same matter and all of a sudden you can be well north of $100 , and with the actual reply to the e-mail still pending. But what did that money buy? Has it bought as much benefit as, say, a 15-minute one-on-one telephone conversation or an equal amount of time spent on research? Probably not, especially in light of the different ways people treat e-mail. While those who barely acknowledge receiving anything by e-mail can be frustrating, compulsive e-mailers who respond to everything and everybody can be maddening. When the cost of reading any e-mail is the equivalent of filling a tank of gas halfway, dinner at a respectable restaurant, or the price of a pair of movie tickets, it is time to deal seriously with the problem. Here, then, are some ideas for limiting professional fees for handling e-mail: 1. Designate one person to be the sole link to the professional. Everyone involved in a matter , accountants, investigators, engineers, consultants and the like , should deal with the professional through the designated link. This will reduce the “reply-to-all” flow, polite but expensive courtesy responses, and extraneous e-mail attachments. 2. Even if the professional has a sophisticated program to track time spent on e-mail relevant to a single client matter, reach an agreement before the engagement begins, to put a cap on e-mail charges. Just as parking lots set a price for each 15 minutes of occupancy , but cap the total cost for a 12-hour period , so professional firms can establish a flat fee for a day’s worth of e-mails. This is important because of the chance for abuse and distraction while dealing with e-mail. There are the times when instant messages or telephone calls interrupt an e-mail session, and intriguing subjects or important senders suddenly appear as new incoming e-mails. Even the wide disparity of speed with which an e-mail and its attachments are electronically delivered can adversely impact fees charged. One way to set the cap is to have client and professional agree that no more than 10 percent of everything in a billing period can be charged to e-mail. 3. Because of the different e-mail habits that people have now adopted, it is almost impossible to control what arrives in an electronic inbox. As a result, another pricing alternative would be to treat e-mail like international postal mail. For example, in the case of a letter sent from Germany to America, the U.S. Postal Service delivers the letter as a courtesy to Deutsche Post on the assumption that there will be a return letter to Germany for which the U.S. system will receive compensation covering both incoming and outgoing pieces. Likewise, in the context of e-mail, only original outgoing messages initiated by a professional should be charged to the client. If you have another idea on how to control the rising cost of e-mails in dealing with professional firms, please be in touch with the author at [email protected]. He responds to everything and everybody. Godfrey Harris, an Encino resident, has been president of Harris/Ragan Management Group, a Los Angeles consulting firm specializing in public policy issues, since 1968.

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