Do u get called on once or more than once???

[xferlawstudent]

As a 2L all of my professors tell you the day before you will be called on.  This is nice to ease some of the pressure but you have to be extra motivated to read daily.

[m34ch]

i subscribe to the "man up" theory of law school.

i raise my hand all the damn time, and after two or three classes, the professor is burnt out on me
and won't call on me again all semester.

after that, i just go about my business
maybe raise my hand to "volunteer" one every couple weeks

it's the perfect crime

[oopslaw]

leave your name off the seating chart - u'll never get called on - profs rarely reference the seating chart against the class roster

One day, not too long after you start practicing law, you will sit down at the end of a long, tiring day, and you just won't have much to show for your efforts in terms of billable hours. It will be near the end of the month. You will know that all of the partners will be looking at your monthly time report in a few days, so what you'll do is pad your time sheet just a bit. Maybe you will bill a client for 90 min for a task that really took you only 60 min to perform. However, you will promise yourself that you will repay the client at the first opportunity by doing 30 min of work for the client for "free." In this way, you will be "borrowing," not "stealing." And then what will happen is that it will become easier and easier to take these little loans against future work. And then, after a while, you will stop paying back these little loans. You will convince yourself that, although you billed for 90 min and spent only 60 min on the project, you did such good work that your client should pay a bit more for it. After all, your billing rate is awfully low, and your client is awfully rich.

And then you will pad more and more -- every 2 min telephone conversation will go down on the sheet as 10 min, every 3 hrs research project will go down with an extra quarter hr or so. You will continue to rationalize your dishonesty to yourself in various ways until one day you stop doing even that. And, before long -- it won't take you much more than 3-4 years -- you will be stealing from your clients almost every day, and you won't even notice it. You know what? You will also likely become a liar. A deadline will come up one day, and, for reasons that are entirely your fault, you will not be able to meet it. So you will call your senior partner or your client and make up a white lie for why you missed the deadline. And then you will get busy and a partner will ask whether you proofread a lengthy prospectus and you will say yes, even though you didn't. And then you will be drafting a brief and you will quote language from a Supreme Court opinion even though you will know that, when read in context, the language does not remotely suggest what you are implying it suggests. And then, in preparing a client for a deposition, you will help the client to formulate an answer to a difficult question that will likely be asked -- an answer that will be "legally accurate" but that will mislead your opponent. And then you will be reading through a big box of your client's documents -- a box that has not been opened in 20 years -- and you will find a document that would hurt your client's case, but that no one except you knows exists, and you will simply "forget" to produce it in response to your opponent's discovery requests.

Do you see what will happen? After a couple years of this, you won't even notice that you are lying and cheating and stealing every day that you practice law. None of these things will seem like a big deal in itself -- an extra 15 minutes added to a time sheet here, a little white lie to cover a missed deadline there. But, after a while, your entire frame of reference will change. You will still be making dozens of quick, instinctive decisions every day, but those decisions, instead of reflecting the notions of right and wrong by which you conduct your personal life, will instead reflect the set of values by which you will conduct your professional life -- a set of values that embodies not what is right or wrong, but what is profitable, and what you can get away with. The system will have succeeded in replacing your values with the system's values, and the system will be profiting as a result.

It is true that not every lawyer knowingly and blatantly lies on his time sheets. But there is a reason why padding time sheets has been called "a silent epidemic." Lots of lawyers pad time sheets in ways that are less obviously dishonest and more socially accepted. For example, a lawyer who needs to fly from L.A. to N.Y. for one client may do the work of another client during the 5-hr flight, and bill both clients 5 hrs -- the first for 5 hours of travel, the second for 5 hours of work. Another common practice is for lawyers not to fill out their time sheets until the end of the day - -or end of the week -- or even end of the month. When a lawyer sits down on July 31 and tries to remember how much time she devoted to a client's work on July 9, 272 it is only natural that she will underestimate the amount of time wasted on coffee breaks and personal phone calls and overestimate the amount of time devoted to the client's work. Another widely accepted way of padding time sheets is to bill in minimum increments of, say, .25 hours or .30 hours. This permits the enterprising lawyer to engage in four 2-min phone calls and bill 1 hour.

[toomuchwork]

Lawyers charge for their services, just like everybody else, and a billable hour is the basic unit of service. Each lawyer has an hourly rate, which clients pay. In big cities like Chicago, rookie lawyers usually charge about $200 per hour. Most lawyers charge their clients in tenths of an hour, or six-minute increments. For example, 1.1 hours (66 minutes) of time from a rookie lawyer costs about $220. For every year that a lawyer has been practicing, her rate goes up. By her 5th year as a lawyer in Chicago, for example, a lawyer will typically charge about $300 per hour. Veteran lawyers (or very prominent ones) can get away with hourly rates as high as $800 per hour.

There are two ways to charge people for your products. The first is a service-based model, like the billable hour, where clients pay for the amount of time it costs to perform the service. The second is a product-based model. Candy bars, for example, are sold as products. A Snickers bar these days costs about eighty cents. That cost covers the whole process: manufacturing the Snickers, shipping it and even advertising for it. A portion of your eighty cents even goes toward stuff like the annual Christmas party at the Mars company headquarters in Virginia. In today's legal world, a billable hour is the same thing as a candy bar. It's the lawyer's "product." Lawyers are not alone in charging service-based fees; auto mechanics, home cleaning services and many types of doctors do the same. A billable hour is simply a product, like a candy bar.

Bad for clients

The biggest problem with billable hours is that it puts the incentive for a lawyer in the wrong place. Lawyers charge clients for their time, not for their work, which means that as a lawyer, the longer I spend working on a project, the more money I make. Think about that for a minute. Let's say I spend ten hours writing a brief. At a billable rate of $250, the cost of that brief is $2500. Suppose the brief could have been written in 5 hours instead of 10. But spending 5 hours on the brief earns the lawyer only $1250. In other words, as a lawyer, the longer it takes you to do something, the more money you earn. Compare this to mowing your lawn. Suppose I were to pay you $10 to mow your lawn. Nobody really likes to mow the lawn, so you try to do it as quickly as possible. Let's say it takes you an hour. But, now suppose I were to pay you $10 for every hour it takes you to mow the lawn. That hour would turn into 2 or 3. The incentive would be to take as much time as possible to finish mowing, even if it could be done a lot faster. When you charge for your time, the incentive is to go slow.

There are limits to this, of course. Lawyers won't charge you more than they think you'll pay, because they want to keep you as a client. So if a client will pay $2000 for a brief, the lawyer won't charge more than that. But if they can get away with it, they'll charge $2000 for the brief even if the cost of writing it was less than that. This is true not because lawyers are bad people, but because the billable hour system provides an incentive for lawyers to take as much time as they can doing a project, even if it could be done more quickly. For a lawyer, efficiency is measured by the number of hours it takes to do something versus the number of hours that get billed to the client. For example, if it takes me 20 hours to write a brief, but only 10 get billed, I'm only 50% efficient. But if it takes me 5 hours to write the brief, that's even better, right? Actually, no. If I spend only 5 hours writing the brief, then only 5 get billed. If I could have spent 10, then I've just lost 5 billable hours. At a $250 price tag per hour, 5 hours is a lot. If a client will pay for 10 hours, then spending 5 hours is 50% efficient.

But wait. I thought 20 hours was 50% efficient. So is 5? Yes. And that's the problem. Efficiency is not speed; it's how close you are to what you think the client will pay. The incentive for lawyers is therefore not to do things quickly, but to spend as much time as possible working on something without going over the amount of time you think the client will pay for. Most lawyers will swear up and down that they don't do this. And for good lawyers, that's actually more true than not. But in the era of the billable hour, it's little wonder that the legal profession has such a bad reputation. We're not paid to work quickly, or even to work hard; we're paid to spend time.

Bad for lawyers too

Believe it or not, the billable hour system hurts lawyers too. A law firm is a business. And like any business, the goal is to make money. Lawyers are therefore judged on the amount of billable hours they generate per year. In most big law firms today, lawyers are expected to bill about 2000 hours per year. Suppose you're a great lawyer, and you're just quick. Suppose you can do in 5 hours what it takes the average lawyer 10 hours to do. Because you're so fast, you only bill 1500 hours in a year. That's good, right? You're faster than the guy in the office next to you and your clients are happy because their bills are lower. Awesome, right? No, because congratulations, you're fired. If you fail to meet your annual billing requirement, you get shown the door. This is true even if you're a great lawyer who can simply do things faster than everyone else. The product of a law firm is billable hours, and the goal is therefore quantity, not quality. In an industry where time is the economic unit of trade, good work done fast is actually bad work.

In any law firm, lawyers are measured by the amount of time they spend working. The more billable hours a lawyer has, the more valuable she is to the business. Whether she's a good lawyer or not is a secondary consideration. Sure, it matters, but it doesn't matter that much. Good lawyers — particularly good and fast lawyers — are consistently passed over for promotions and bonuses at the end of the year. This is a bad thing for the legal profession, because the most valuable lawyers end up being the ones who work a lot, not the ones who are the best.

An attorney at a big firm gets assigned to review some documents in preparation for a trial. The documents are stored on a CD-ROM, and there are thousands of them. His job was to review the documents in search of a particular name. We'll call the name "Bob." He uses a computer search program to run through all the documents, and then he reads through the hundred or so documents the computer identified as including the name "Bob." The whole process takes about 2 hours. Another lawyer at the same firm doesn't follow that process. Instead, he prints out the thousands of documents and reviews all of them by hand. His process takes about 18 hrs, and he ends up with the same hundred or so. His work takes longer, and is therefore more valuable. Not surprisingly, he has billed his 2000 hours at the end of the year, and is rewarded for a job well done.

Time, not skill, is the object of the game. This does not bode well for young lawyers who also want to have a life outside of work. Reaching 2000 billable hours per year is actually quite hard. A recent survey by ABA found that lawyers on average spend 3 hours at work for every 2 hours billed. To bill 2000 hours per year, the average lawyer will therefore need to spend 2667 hours working. That's 7 and a half hours per day, including weekends and holidays. 29% of every year is occupied by weekends. In other words, if you work Monday through Friday every week for one year, you'll spend 259 days working. To bill 2000 hours as a lawyer, you'll need to spend 10.3 hours working every day if you want to have a life on the weekends. And that's assuming that you work on all holidays and never take a vacation.

In 1958, when billable hours were just beginning to come into vogue in the legal profession, the American Bar Association concluded that there were 1300 billable hours in any calendar year. (They were assuming, by the way, that every lawyer will work half a day on Saturdays.) If you tried billing that much as a lawyer today, you would be fired, and quickly. Not only do most big firms today require 2000 hours per year, but the currently popular thing to do is to increase the requirement to 2200. Sure, associates at these firms make gobs of money; the market average in big cities has now reached $135,000 just for the rookies. But having a life? Forget about it. Do the math, and you'll realize that that massive salary comes at a massive price. The billable hour system increases the price clients have to pay, passes over good lawyers in favor of slow ones and destroys the lifestyle of lawyers who are caught up in it. Great system, huh?

Instead of selling their knowledge and skill in chunks of time, lawyers could sell their knowledge and skill according to some kind of product.

[fill-in-the-blanks]

Suppose you're a great lawyer, and you're just quick. Suppose you can do in 5 hours what it takes the average lawyer 10 hours to do. Because you're so fast, you only bill 1500 hours in a year. That's good, right? You're faster than the guy in the office next to you and your clients are happy because their bills are lower. Awesome, right? No, because congratulations, you're fired. If you fail to meet your annual billing requirement, you get shown the door. This is true even if you're a great lawyer who can simply do things faster than everyone else. The product of a law firm is billable hours, and the goal is therefore quantity, not quality. In an industry where time is the economic unit of trade, good work done fast is actually bad work.

In any law firm, lawyers are measured by the amount of time they spend working. The more billable hours a lawyer has, the more valuable she is to the business. Whether she's a good lawyer or not is a secondary consideration. Sure, it matters, but it doesn't matter that much. Good lawyers — particularly good and fast lawyers — are consistently passed over for promotions and bonuses at the end of the year. This is a bad thing for the legal profession, because the most valuable lawyers end up being the ones who work a lot, not the ones who are the best.

So basically with the passing of time you learn how to slow yourself down, how to become a moron?!

[grand slam]

One day, not too long after you start practicing law, you will sit down at the end of a long, tiring day, and you just won't have much to show for your efforts in terms of billable hours. It will be near the end of the month. You will know that all of the partners will be looking at your monthly time report in a few days, so what you'll do is pad your time sheet just a bit. Maybe you will bill a client for 90 min for a task that really took you only 60 min to perform. However, you will promise yourself that you will repay the client at the first opportunity by doing 30 min of work for the client for "free." In this way, you will be "borrowing," not "stealing." And then what will happen is that it will become easier and easier to take these little loans against future work. And then, after a while, you will stop paying back these little loans. You will convince yourself that, although you billed for 90 min and spent only 60 min on the project, you did such good work that your client should pay a bit more for it. After all, your billing rate is awfully low, and your client is awfully rich.

And then you will pad more and more -- every 2 min telephone conversation will go down on the sheet as 10 min, every 3 hrs research project will go down with an extra quarter hr or so. You will continue to rationalize your dishonesty to yourself in various ways until one day you stop doing even that. And, before long -- it won't take you much more than 3-4 years -- you will be stealing from your clients almost every day, and you won't even notice it. You know what? You will also likely become a liar. A deadline will come up one day, and, for reasons that are entirely your fault, you will not be able to meet it. So you will call your senior partner or your client and make up a white lie for why you missed the deadline. And then you will get busy and a partner will ask whether you proofread a lengthy prospectus and you will say yes, even though you didn't. And then you will be drafting a brief and you will quote language from a Supreme Court opinion even though you will know that, when read in context, the language does not remotely suggest what you are implying it suggests. And then, in preparing a client for a deposition, you will help the client to formulate an answer to a difficult question that will likely be asked -- an answer that will be "legally accurate" but that will mislead your opponent. And then you will be reading through a big box of your client's documents -- a box that has not been opened in 20 years -- and you will find a document that would hurt your client's case, but that no one except you knows exists, and you will simply "forget" to produce it in response to your opponent's discovery requests.

Do you see what will happen? After a couple years of this, you won't even notice that you are lying and cheating and stealing every day that you practice law. None of these things will seem like a big deal in itself -- an extra 15 minutes added to a time sheet here, a little white lie to cover a missed deadline there. But, after a while, your entire frame of reference will change. You will still be making dozens of quick, instinctive decisions every day, but those decisions, instead of reflecting the notions of right and wrong by which you conduct your personal life, will instead reflect the set of values by which you will conduct your professional life -- a set of values that embodies not what is right or wrong, but what is profitable, and what you can get away with. The system will have succeeded in replacing your values with the system's values, and the system will be profiting as a result.

It is true that not every lawyer knowingly and blatantly lies on his time sheets. But there is a reason why padding time sheets has been called "a silent epidemic." Lots of lawyers pad time sheets in ways that are less obviously dishonest and more socially accepted. For example, a lawyer who needs to fly from L.A. to N.Y. for one client may do the work of another client during the 5-hr flight, and bill both clients 5 hrs -- the first for 5 hours of travel, the second for 5 hours of work. Another common practice is for lawyers not to fill out their time sheets until the end of the day - -or end of the week -- or even end of the month. When a lawyer sits down on July 31 and tries to remember how much time she devoted to a client's work on July 9, 272 it is only natural that she will underestimate the amount of time wasted on coffee breaks and personal phone calls and overestimate the amount of time devoted to the client's work. Another widely accepted way of padding time sheets is to bill in minimum increments of, say, .25 hours or .30 hours. This permits the enterprising lawyer to engage in four 2-min phone calls and bill 1 hour.

[...] Efficiency is not speed; it's how close you are to what you think the client will pay. The incentive for lawyers is therefore not to do things quickly, but to spend as much time as possible working on something without going over the amount of time you think the client will pay for. Most lawyers will swear up and down that they don't do this. And for good lawyers, that's actually more true than not. But in the era of the billable hour, it's little wonder that the legal profession has such a bad reputation. We're not paid to work quickly, or even to work hard; we're paid to spend time.

Suppose you're a great lawyer, and you're just quick. Suppose you can do in 5 hours what it takes the average lawyer 10 hours to do. Because you're so fast, you only bill 1500 hours in a year. That's good, right? You're faster than the guy in the office next to you and your clients are happy because their bills are lower. Awesome, right? No, because congratulations, you're fired. If you fail to meet your annual billing requirement, you get shown the door. This is true even if you're a great lawyer who can simply do things faster than everyone else. The product of a law firm is billable hours, and the goal is therefore quantity, not quality. In an industry where time is the economic unit of trade, good work done fast is actually bad work.

In any law firm, lawyers are measured by the amount of time they spend working. The more billable hours a lawyer has, the more valuable she is to the business. Whether she's a good lawyer or not is a secondary consideration. Sure, it matters, but it doesn't matter that much. Good lawyers — particularly good and fast lawyers — are consistently passed over for promotions and bonuses at the end of the year. This is a bad thing for the legal profession, because the most valuable lawyers end up being the ones who work a lot, not the ones who are the best.

Well, I guess thanks to these "tricks" and the "working slowly" principle lawyers adhere to, biglaw doesn't appear to be that scary!

[Weezer1223]

Torts- 1
Contracts- 2
Civil Procedure I- 1

Crim law- 0
Property- 0
Con law- 3

[Strong]

1L

Property - Non-socratic

Civ Pro (1 semester) - 1

Contracts - 1.5

Torts - 3

Crim Law (1 semester) - 1

Con Law (1 semester) - 1

[xferlawstudent]

...and the next day you will plagerize a Vandy Professor's Law Review article and post it on a law school discussion board without attributing the true author's work 

Patrick J. Schiltz, On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member of an Unhappy,Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession, 52 Vand. L. Rev. 871, 917 (1999)

leave your name off the seating chart - u'll never get called on - profs rarely reference the seating chart against the class roster

One day, not too long after you start practicing law, you will sit down at the end of a long, tiring day, and you just won't have much to show for your efforts in terms of billable hours. It will be near the end of the month. You will know that all of the partners will be looking at your monthly time report in a few days, so what you'll do is pad your time sheet just a bit. Maybe you will bill a client for 90 min for a task that really took you only 60 min to perform. However, you will promise yourself that you will repay the client at the first opportunity by doing 30 min of work for the client for "free." In this way, you will be "borrowing," not "stealing." And then what will happen is that it will become easier and easier to take these little loans against future work. And then, after a while, you will stop paying back these little loans. You will convince yourself that, although you billed for 90 min and spent only 60 min on the project, you did such good work that your client should pay a bit more for it. After all, your billing rate is awfully low, and your client is awfully rich.

And then you will pad more and more -- every 2 min telephone conversation will go down on the sheet as 10 min, every 3 hrs research project will go down with an extra quarter hr or so. You will continue to rationalize your dishonesty to yourself in various ways until one day you stop doing even that. And, before long -- it won't take you much more than 3-4 years -- you will be stealing from your clients almost every day, and you won't even notice it. You know what? You will also likely become a liar. A deadline will come up one day, and, for reasons that are entirely your fault, you will not be able to meet it. So you will call your senior partner or your client and make up a white lie for why you missed the deadline. And then you will get busy and a partner will ask whether you proofread a lengthy prospectus and you will say yes, even though you didn't. And then you will be drafting a brief and you will quote language from a Supreme Court opinion even though you will know that, when read in context, the language does not remotely suggest what you are implying it suggests. And then, in preparing a client for a deposition, you will help the client to formulate an answer to a difficult question that will likely be asked -- an answer that will be "legally accurate" but that will mislead your opponent. And then you will be reading through a big box of your client's documents -- a box that has not been opened in 20 years -- and you will find a document that would hurt your client's case, but that no one except you knows exists, and you will simply "forget" to produce it in response to your opponent's discovery requests.

Do you see what will happen? After a couple years of this, you won't even notice that you are lying and cheating and stealing every day that you practice law. None of these things will seem like a big deal in itself -- an extra 15 minutes added to a time sheet here, a little white lie to cover a missed deadline there. But, after a while, your entire frame of reference will change. You will still be making dozens of quick, instinctive decisions every day, but those decisions, instead of reflecting the notions of right and wrong by which you conduct your personal life, will instead reflect the set of values by which you will conduct your professional life -- a set of values that embodies not what is right or wrong, but what is profitable, and what you can get away with. The system will have succeeded in replacing your values with the system's values, and the system will be profiting as a result.

It is true that not every lawyer knowingly and blatantly lies on his time sheets. But there is a reason why padding time sheets has been called "a silent epidemic." Lots of lawyers pad time sheets in ways that are less obviously dishonest and more socially accepted. For example, a lawyer who needs to fly from L.A. to N.Y. for one client may do the work of another client during the 5-hr flight, and bill both clients 5 hrs -- the first for 5 hours of travel, the second for 5 hours of work. Another common practice is for lawyers not to fill out their time sheets until the end of the day - -or end of the week -- or even end of the month. When a lawyer sits down on July 31 and tries to remember how much time she devoted to a client's work on July 9, 272 it is only natural that she will underestimate the amount of time wasted on coffee breaks and personal phone calls and overestimate the amount of time devoted to the client's work. Another widely accepted way of padding time sheets is to bill in minimum increments of, say, .25 hours or .30 hours. This permits the enterprising lawyer to engage in four 2-min phone calls and bill 1 hour.

[legerdemain]

leave your name off the seating chart -- you'll never get called on -- profs rarely reference the seating chart against the class roster

One day, not too long after you start practicing law, you will sit down at the end of a long, tiring day, and you just won't have much to show for your efforts in terms of billable hours. It will be near the end of the month. You will know that all of the partners will be looking at your monthly time report in a few days, so what you'll do is pad your time sheet just a bit. Maybe you will bill a client for 90 min for a task that really took you only 60 min to perform. However, you will promise yourself that you will repay the client at the first opportunity by doing 30 min of work for the client for "free." In this way, you will be "borrowing," not "stealing." And then what will happen is that it will become easier and easier to take these little loans against future work. And then, after a while, you will stop paying back these little loans. You will convince yourself that, although you billed for 90 min and spent only 60 min on the project, you did such good work that your client should pay a bit more for it. After all, your billing rate is awfully low, and your client is awfully rich.

And then you will pad more and more -- every 2 min telephone conversation will go down on the sheet as 10 min, every 3 hrs research project will go down with an extra quarter hr or so. You will continue to rationalize your dishonesty to yourself in various ways until one day you stop doing even that. And, before long -- it won't take you much more than 3-4 years -- you will be stealing from your clients almost every day, and you won't even notice it. You know what? You will also likely become a liar. A deadline will come up one day, and, for reasons that are entirely your fault, you will not be able to meet it. So you will call your senior partner or your client and make up a white lie for why you missed the deadline. And then you will get busy and a partner will ask whether you proofread a lengthy prospectus and you will say yes, even though you didn't. And then you will be drafting a brief and you will quote language from a Supreme Court opinion even though you will know that, when read in context, the language does not remotely suggest what you are implying it suggests. And then, in preparing a client for a deposition, you will help the client to formulate an answer to a difficult question that will likely be asked -- an answer that will be "legally accurate" but that will mislead your opponent. And then you will be reading through a big box of your client's documents -- a box that has not been opened in 20 years -- and you will find a document that would hurt your client's case, but that no one except you knows exists, and you will simply "forget" to produce it in response to your opponent's discovery requests.

Do you see what will happen? After a couple years of this, you won't even notice that you are lying and cheating and stealing every day that you practice law. None of these things will seem like a big deal in itself -- an extra 15 minutes added to a time sheet here, a little white lie to cover a missed deadline there. But, after a while, your entire frame of reference will change. You will still be making dozens of quick, instinctive decisions every day, but those decisions, instead of reflecting the notions of right and wrong by which you conduct your personal life, will instead reflect the set of values by which you will conduct your professional life -- a set of values that embodies not what is right or wrong, but what is profitable, and what you can get away with. The system will have succeeded in replacing your values with the system's values, and the system will be profiting as a result.

It is true that not every lawyer knowingly and blatantly lies on his time sheets. But there is a reason why padding time sheets has been called "a silent epidemic." Lots of lawyers pad time sheets in ways that are less obviously dishonest and more socially accepted. For example, a lawyer who needs to fly from L.A. to N.Y. for one client may do the work of another client during the 5-hr flight, and bill both clients 5 hrs -- the first for 5 hours of travel, the second for 5 hours of work. Another common practice is for lawyers not to fill out their time sheets until the end of the day - -or end of the week -- or even end of the month. When a lawyer sits down on July 31 and tries to remember how much time she devoted to a client's work on July 9, 272 it is only natural that she will underestimate the amount of time wasted on coffee breaks and personal phone calls and overestimate the amount of time devoted to the client's work. Another widely accepted way of padding time sheets is to bill in minimum increments of, say, .25 hours or .30 hours. This permits the enterprising lawyer to engage in four 2-min phone calls and bill 1 hour.

...and the next day you will plagerize a Vandy Professor's Law Review article and post it on a law school discussion board without attributing the true author's work 

Patrick J. Schiltz, On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member of an Unhappy,Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession, 52 Vand. L. Rev. 871, 917 (1999)

That's where you step in, xferls!