Some legal columnists have intimated that 2024 is the year that we lawyers will see clients demand alternatives to being billed by the hour. There have been rumblings about this for a few years now. The trend is for us to open up to alternative ways of communicating to clients our value and how we are to be compensated for our work. The idea is that clients are looking for more efficient and economical ways in which to pay for and afford legal services. Some of us may take this as the desire for clients to pay less for what we do. Perhaps this is going on. But, being positive, we as attorneys could look at it as a way to garner more business by being attentive to client’s financial abilities and a willingness to really pay attention to where we are spending their time and therefore their money. I once had a client who was very attentive to saving money during the representation. So we agreed that if she was up for it, she could perform some of the more administrative tasks of her representation as opposed to paying me or my assistant to do it, like initially going to the courthouse to print off her whole court file and delivering it to me. She saved about an hour of my billable time by doing that herself. As long as she was cool with it, I was cool with it. We are all going to probably be challenged this year to not be so rigid in our billing practices. Be open to client suggestions about how they pay for your services. I think this doesn’t have to turn into a discussion about devaluing our work. I still stand by the prospect that what we do is intensely valuable and deserves substantial compensation. But, perhaps there is more than one way to fully realize that considering the trend. So, lighten up!