Here's the rub and why the billable hour will always be a relevant factor in legal work: The only thing lawyers have to sell is their time. We don't make anything. We can spend months, or even years, of very successful lawyering and, at the end of the engagement, have only an abstraction (vindication of a right, an entitlement to property) to show for the work. Our most eloquent arguments are ephemeral and, when the case is over, valueless. So when our firm quotes a flat fee, we do some very rudimentary math. We figure, as best we can at the very beginning of a case, how long it will take us, working efficiently, to do the legal work the client requests. We then multiply those hours by the hourly rate that we hope to collect. That rate, by the way, is a function of what we need to bill to keep the lights on plus the profit we think we reasonably deserve for our work which is, in turn, at least in part a function of what we think the market will bear. Then we add 10% to account for unknowns.
After all that, we explain that calculus to clients. More often than not, clients opt to pay by the billable hour. They correctly understand that paying lawyers for the time they actually expend is fairest to all concerned. Now, do we compete on the basis of our rates? Of course. And not just that, we compete on the basis of our experience, training, and substantive knowledge. We try to explain that we are not just advocates but counselors. Those aren't just the ethical demands of our profession; they are the essence of what people hire lawyers to do. Some will say that lawyers who bill by the hour have an incentive to work more slowly and less efficiently. There is a term for lawyers who indulge that temptation. Thieves. No tinkering with billing schemes or revolution in accounting will solve that problem.