Hourly billing on trial in Australia

John Chisholm is a consultant in Australia who also shares VeraSage's disdain of timesheets. His father, Don Chisholm, is still a practicing attorney in his late seventies and has never filled out a timesheet in his life. This letter to the editor from John to the Lawyer's Weekly in Australia, published August 9, 2006, explains how hourly billing came about down under and what they are trying to do about it. Note that John says hourly billing didn't really become endemic until the late 1970s in Australia, while in the United States it was actually well-entrenched by the 1950s.