The concept of lawyers’ billable hours is so ridiculous from all perspectives except those of the lawyer that I was sure that the practice must have dated back to King John’s 1215 Magna Carta when I could well imagine that there was a lawyer in the King’s court who explained that while he agreed with the concept that all, including the king, should be subject to law, and while he was all for drafting a document that would be the seed from which glorious law and democracy would grow, he wouldn’t be able to draft such an historical document on the cheap, but would need to charge by the hour since he didn’t know how long it would take.

But this was not the case. If fact it seems, according to the NY Times, that billable hours began, in the U.S. at least, in the 1960s. And now it may be that law firms are having to rethink the logic of charging hundreds of dollars (do you believe $800 in some cases, maybe more) because the economy is deep in the toilet and we haven’t even got to the flush.

Yes, for that reason — sure, sure, sure, to quote Paul Newman in The Hudsucker Proxy — but also because they can make more money if they don’t bill by the hour, this according to author Scott Turow:

Greed may also encourage lawyers to change their payment plans. Law firms are running out of hours that they can bill in a year, said Scott F. Turow, best-selling author of legal thrillers and a partner at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal in Chicago.

“Firms are approaching the limit of how hard they can ask lawyers to work,” he wrote, in an e-mail response to a reporter’s query. “Without alternative billing schemes, lawyers will not be able to maintain the rapid escalation in incomes that big firms have seen.”

Now this reasoning I can understand in a culture in which $18 billion is paid out in bonuses to executives of failed businesses, in which the Governor of Illinois tried to sell Obama’s Senate seat, in which Bernie Madoff could hold his head high while economically destroying lives, in which President Obama is forced to be the teacher who explains that corporate jets aren’t a good purchase decision when times are bad. Certainly rapid escalation in incomes makes sense in a culture that rarely seems to consider more to ever be enough.