I think we all wish D.C. would stop beating about the bush and get to his point, already. What, is he being paid by the word or something?
101. Fair Suggestions
The Illustrated Guide to Law
The comic that teaches what the law is, how it really works, and why.
Aren’t all lawyers paid by the word? :D
By the hour, at least.
So…
They should also, hm, talk… slowly…
in addition to using many extra words that are unnecessary and even more, redundant, for conveying the actual information that’s crucial to their point, well beyond where their listeners grasp the idea, yet nevertheless are still quite functional in consuming all that additional time to help pad out the posts and and thus, their bill.
At least DC is restrained by the size of the panels on the page.
He does like the sound of his own voice, doesn’t he?
Though as for billing, if he’s like me he probably charges a flat fee. Value of the service, irrespective of the time spent on it. Lets one forget about the clock, stop worrying about getting paid, and just focus on doing the job.
(Bonus trivia: That’s how all lawyers used to do it. And rates were fixed by the state bar — you had to charge a minimum of $X for such-and-such work. But in the mid-20th Century, clients bitched and moaned that they were paying too much for seemingly routine tasks, and started demanding that they only pay for how much work was actually done — and that the firms itemize their billing so they could monitor what the lawyers were actually doing. Law firms cried “please, Br’er Client, don’t throw us in the briar patch,” adopted hourly billing, and chortled all the way to the bank. True story.)
Wonder if conviction is correlated with verbosity…
I think you have a typo in the third paragraph. Should be:
The person who was arrested was arrested precisely because they matched the description.
or:
The person was arrested precisely because they matched the description.
I don’t think so. After the m-dash, he giving a “that is” clause.
Don’t lawyers charge by the hour? The longer he talks, the more billable hours… How is that lawyers bill more hours in a week than there are hours in a week? A heck of a racket!
Depends on the case. Some stuff you might charge a flat fee, especially rudimentary stuff like a traffic court show-up. In cases where the dispute is over the amount A has to pay B, you might charge B a commission, a percentage of what you win. Hourly is generally for more complicated cases, too variable a time investment for a flat fee, but there’s no guaranteed payout, so commissions won’t work either. Most cases do fall into the hourly category (or the “six minutes”-ey category).
As for the hours billed, sometimes there’s overlap between cases. Let’s say you’ve got a case that requires you to draft a new type of document, but once it’s drafted, it’s modular, and you’ll just need to plug in the applicable numbers. That same day it turns out that another of your cases requires the same type of document. You can bill both clients for the time it took you to draft the document. That’s how you get more billables than real-time hours.
There seems to be an issue with the comment box where the text box grows as you type but the size of the frame is fixed, so if you type enough the “post comment” disappears off the bottom edge and you can’t click it. If you keep typing after that, the frame grows so that it can hold the whole text box, but not the button underneath.
(Unless that is an intentional feature to prevent people from posting long comments?)
(If it helps with debugging, I am browsing in Firefox and logged in via WordPress.)
I’ve seen this happen on my Android phone, too. I’ve found that tapping outside the box brings the buttons back. But I haven’t figured out a fix yet. Suggestions are welcome!
For now, if your comment is too long, you can hit the tab key repeatedly to jump to the email field, then the name field, then the website field, then the post comment button. Hitting enter while selecting the post comment button will cause the comment to post.