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$700/hr for legal advice vs. $100/hr for a top software engineer – why?

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41–50 of 82 posts

Re: $700/hr for legal advice vs. $100/hr for a top software engineer – why?

#41

I truly hope he is not a great iOS developer because that rate is criminally low. There is something magical that happens in the 100 pennies between 99 per hour and 100 per hour, a mental chasm that is in reality no different than 98/hr vs 99/hr but we make it into a big deal. Why he chose that number, and why people choose any number for an hourly rate is always a curious thing to me. We pick numbers that we think a…

I'm a top Android developer from the Czech Republic and usually charge about $25/hour.

Re: $700/hr for legal advice vs. $100/hr for a top software engineer – why?

#42

* law firms are inefficient in their use of technology * legal work is more likely to be boring, so you have to pay people more to do it (this is related to the first point above) * if an app has a bug, it's usually easy to spot - if a contract has a bug, you may never know about it until it bites you. so you pay for the best attorney you can get, in the hopes of getting fewer bugs * lawyers are more at the beck and…

Inefficiency is no excuse. I'm sure there are as many lawyers who love or hate their job as there are developers that do... some people (like myself) love doing the work but I have many colleagues who find it tedius and boring. I would say also not an excuse. Security or data integrity flaws are no more apparent than contract holes, and often are equally as disruptive. Developers aren't at the beck and call? Lol I wo…

i'm not trying to make excuses for lawyers, i'm just providing you with reasons.

and as someone who's been both a developer and a lawyer, lawyers are much more at the beck and call of clients. software engineers generally know when they have deadlines approaching. lawyers get informed Friday night of a deadline they have Monday morning (transactional lawyers, that is).

your last sentence is precisely the point i was making re bugs.

Re: $700/hr for legal advice vs. $100/hr for a top software engineer – why?

#43
post #10

Is it fair to compare a major law firm with an independent software engineer? At my last company (~3000 employees) when I did billable work they charged the client 300/hour. From a few minutes of googling I am reading that typical lawyer fees (not big law firms) are 200-300 dollar an hour, eg: http://www.topix.com/forum/city/utica-ny/TDV8TU0N3HTLL1UMK . I've never hired a lawyer and I've never directly contracted mys…

Agreed with parent. The burdened rate (that is pay, plus benefits, plus company overhead) for a decent sized software company will easily be $200 - $800 /hr depending on location and company size.

Lawyers are licensed and specialized - the costs associated are passed through to the customers into their rate.

Re: $700/hr for legal advice vs. $100/hr for a top software engineer – why?

#44
post #40

* law firms are inefficient in their use of technology * legal work is more likely to be boring, so you have to pay people more to do it (this is related to the first point above) * if an app has a bug, it's usually easy to spot - if a contract has a bug, you may never know about it until it bites you. so you pay for the best attorney you can get, in the hopes of getting fewer bugs * lawyers are more at the beck and…

"legal work is more likely to be boring, so you have to pay people more to do it" Sweeping floors and cleaning toilets is also pretty boring, but I don't see anyone paying janitors more because of it.

if you needed smart janitors, you would.

Re: $700/hr for legal advice vs. $100/hr for a top software engineer – why?

#45
You want to charge $700 / hour for programming? You want to be a professional in the same sense as a doctor or a lawyer? Fine!

1. Get a PhD in computer science or software engineering. 2. Submit to state licensing, certifications, fees, examinations and codes of conduct. 3. Buy liabilty insurance in case your screw-ups hurt someone and they sue your incompetent ass.

Look, doctors and lawyers have been around at least since civilization arose, say six to ten thousand years. Programming as a profession independent of, say, doing math or building weapons systems or accounting has been around only since the 1950s, and it wasn't till the 1960s that large numbers of people got paid to do nothing but programming.

Re: $700/hr for legal advice vs. $100/hr for a top software engineer – why?

#46

I truly hope he is not a great iOS developer because that rate is criminally low. There is something magical that happens in the 100 pennies between 99 per hour and 100 per hour, a mental chasm that is in reality no different than 98/hr vs 99/hr but we make it into a big deal. Why he chose that number, and why people choose any number for an hourly rate is always a curious thing to me. We pick numbers that we think a…

I'm a top Android developer from the Czech Republic and usually charge about $25/hour.

And this is probably why. Americans can hire developers from other countries where they can be paid less.

Americans can't hire lawyers from the Czech Republic.

Re: $700/hr for legal advice vs. $100/hr for a top software engineer – why?

#47
software eng did/does not have to

go to law school (or take any college really)

pass the bar (or any certification at all)

maintain his membership in bar (or any level of professional conduct or accountability)

be legally responsible for the work he performs (in same way lawyers, doctors and other accredited / certification passing professions must)

See also supply and demand. Every half skilled monkey can be an iOS developer (or any kind of developer. Honestly, it's really not that hard. Compared to lawyering, doctoring. Also developer != architect, lead, technical manager, entrepreneur, etc which are all much more difficult. OTOH people who couldn't hack EE or that drop out of college can be successful developers.)

Re: $700/hr for legal advice vs. $100/hr for a top software engineer – why?

#48
post #33

Is it feasible to program a machine learning system (such as Watson?) to run a straightforward legal case, with a natural language interface? Presumably the majority of "bread and butter" legal cases don't require an innovative step? Rather, they involve rolling out a set of standard arguments and countering a set of standard arguments put forward by the opposition, a bit like a chess game? I'm talking straighforward…

Is it feasible to program a machine learning system (such as Watson?) to run a straightforward legal case, with a natural language interface?

The law is full of context and interpretation details. One example my business constantly runs into is weather or not we have to register as a 'foreign business" when we do business in other states (my business is an engineering consulting business that does work in many states, sometimes requiring travel, sometimes not).

All of the states we looked into have the same basic wording tin the foreign business statue, but they interpret it different - for some states, you only have to register is you maintain an office presence; for some states you have to register only if you spend a significant amount of time in the state, other states you have to register if the money originates in the state, even if you never set foot there.

I'd love to see someone with ML or AI experience address the challenges involved in this. I would imagine it would be possible, but require a shitload of work, and even then may require some review.

Re: $700/hr for legal advice vs. $100/hr for a top software engineer – why?

#49
Prices are of course about supply and demand. The supply of business lawyers is limited, which keeps prices (relatively) high. What keeps supply limited? In practice, bar admission requirements are not the operative bottleneck. There are about twice as many JD's each year as there are jobs for them, and the prices for entry-level legal work (across the whole industry) have fallen far below that of entry-level engineering work. A programmer from a top 100 school with decent but not amazing grades can come out expecting to get a job and making $45k+. A lawyer with similar credentials might go a year without finding a job and end up making $35-40k at a small firm.

So what keeps prices high at the top end? The answer is branding. Business clients don't trust their sensitive legal work to firms that don't have brands. And these firms that have brands don't hire just anyone. Only about 10-15% of fresh JD's end up at a medium to large firm working on corporate law, and the majority of them come out of the top 20 (of 200+) law schools. There are only so many graduates of Stanford and Berkeley to go around, so only so many of them get hired and trained at business law firms, and only so many of those make it to partner and build up years of experience. This is the real supply bottleneck.

You've always seen this phenomenon in banking and consulting (business clients trust their M&A to Goldman, who hires from Harvard and Princeton, maybe Yale if they're really feeling pinched). Now, you're seeing it in engineering too. It used to be that large companies didn't care much about where you went to school or what your grades were. But these days, places like Google, Facebook, etc, disproportionately recruits from the Stanford/MIT set. As a result, salaries at these companies have bid up dramatically. I hear a fourth year engineer at Google can make $250k+. That's comparable to a fourth year lawyer at a top law firm. These salaries were unheard of in engineering back when places like IBM didn't care all that much about Stanford versus CSU.

Re: $700/hr for legal advice vs. $100/hr for a top software engineer – why?

#50
All major Silicon Valley law firms (Gunderson, Wilson Sonsini, Fenwick, Cooley) will defer your fees to get you as a client. You should negotiate at least $15k-$20k of deferral of fees if you are a startup, which means you won't cut them a check until/unless you get financed. They should also offer you a discount on their normal rates of 10-20%. And they may ask for warrants; up to you to issue these. They may pound sand, but if they really want those, then you should be getting a lot of legal work for free.

The vast majority of legal work they do for you as a startup is form work, so don't ever pay a partner more than a half hour to review it. 90% of the work is literally changing names in a document: incorporation docs, board notes, issuance of options, option plan, assignments of IP, and financing docs should all be standardized. I know this because I worked at Gunderson as an attorney.

What you want from startup lawyers is a clean form that your investors have seen before. Don't do anything that makes an investor think twice. Any form from the firms I mentioned above will do.

Net net: you shouldn't worry about $700/hour. It's too much, you shouldn't be hiring that particular attorney, and even if you do owe thousands of dollars, you shouldn't have to pay it until you're financed (which means you have the cash anyway).

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