Several years ago, the insurance company I worked for decided to open their own field legal office in a Midwest city. When I informed the local claim manager of the decision, he asked incredulously, "Why does the company want to do that? Our local attorney is only charging us $65 an hour." What the claim manager forgot to mention was that the outside attorney's per-file costs were among the highest in the region. To be sure, this attorney was engaging in some significant overbilling.

Just like overindulging is a polite term for getting drunk, overbilling is just a polite term for billing fraud. And just as many drunks do not really think that they have a drinking problem, many lawyers apparently do not think they have an ethical problem if they overbill their clients. This sad fact is borne out by a number of important reports and studies over the past two decades. Even the American Bar Association (ABA) has taken official notice of the problems caused by lawyer billing abuses. In 1993, the ABA's committee on ethics and professional responsibility called lawyer billing problems a "major contributory factor to the discouraging public opinion of the legal profession."

Abusive lawyer billing practices have also been studied and reported on by a number of legal scholars. Considered by many to be the leading academic scholar on the subject of lawyer overbilling, Professor William Ross conducted three important surveys of lawyers beginning in 1991. His most recent survey in 2006-2007 of lawyers in all types of practice settings found a discouraging upward trend in the percentage of attorneys who not only admitted to billing abuses, but saw no ethical problem with it. For example, the percentage of attorneys who believed that "double billing" was unethical fell from 64.7 percent in the 1995-1996 survey to 51.8 percent in the 2006-2007 survey. (To view past survey results on lawyer billing abuses, click here.)