The $1000 .PDF

One of my tech company friends called to tell me that their BigLaw firm, who shall remain nameless, assigned a $200 an hour paralegal to scan a closing binder (roughly 700 pages) into a PDF.  The paralegal took nearly 5 hours, at a cost of nearly $1000.00.  

Damn!  Now that's an expensive PDF!

At my suggestion, my tech company friend objected and the law firm reduced the bill, but this is a common example of how these BigLaw firms inappropriately assigning work to employees with higher hourly rates than the project justifies, and this goes on all the time.   

This same project could have been outsourced to a legal support vendor, who would have charged between $100 and $200 for the project, but law firms do not and should not make money on this kind of an outsourced scanning project.  Nevertheless, this project should have been outsourced.  

When it comes to working with the BigLaw firms, buyer beware--the BigLaw firms aggressively bill their clients, and sometimes without regard for value delivered.