Most of what lawyers do is folklore
Steve Jobs figured this out about business. Lawyers should too.
Steve Jobs once said something that stuck with me. He’d been running Apple for a few years and noticed that nobody in business could explain why they did what they did. The answer was always the same: “That’s just the way it’s done.”
He gave this example. Apple’s accountants used something called “standard cost.” They’d guess what something cost to make, then adjust at the end of the quarter with a “variance.”
Jobs kept asking why. After six months of digging, he figured out the real answer: the accountants didn’t know what things actually cost because the company’s information systems weren’t good enough. So they guessed and corrected later.
Nobody said it that way, though. They just said, “That’s how it’s done.”
Jobs called this folklore. And he was right.
The same thing happens in law. Constantly.
Billable hours in six-minute increments
Ask a lawyer why we bill by the hour, in six-minute increments, and you’ll get one of two answers:
“That’s how lawyers bill.”
“Clients expect it.”
Neither answer is the real one. The real reason is the same as Jobs’s standard-cost story: we don’t actually know what our work is worth. We can’t price the outcome, so we price the input. And we measure that input in six-minute chunks because that was the smallest unit a lawyer could reliably track on paper decades ago.
The information systems are bad. So we guess.
That was a fine answer in 1955. It’s not a great answer in 2026, when better tools exist for scoping work, pricing outcomes, and tracking value. But most lawyers won’t ask the question, so the practice keeps going.
Three more pieces of folklore in law
Once you start looking, this stuff is everywhere:
Drafting documents from scratch. Lawyers say “every matter is unique.” Maybe 20% of it is. The other 80% is the same clauses we’ve written hundreds of times. We rewrite the boilerplate because we never built a system to capture and reuse it. The real reason is laziness about systems, not the uniqueness of the work.
“Let’s get on a call.” This is the reflex. Sometimes a call really is faster. Often it isn’t. The real driver is that writing forces clarity, and a lot of people would rather wing a call than think hard enough to put it in writing. Bonus folklore for lawyers: a call leaves no record. An email does. Which one is actually better for the client?
CLE compliance. Nobody loves it, but nobody questions it either. Here’s the folklore: we pretend that sitting through a one-hour webinar equals continuing education. It doesn’t. Real learning involves quizzes, repetition, and some way to check that the material stuck. CLE has none of that. It’s the DMV — show up, prove you’re alive, get your ticket punched. And the bar associations have no incentive to change it because they make money off it.
What to do about it
Jobs’s whole point was that this stuff isn’t hard to fix. You just have to be willing to ask questions and think a little. The reason most people don’t is that asking “why” makes you look naive or annoying. So they go along.
Don’t go along. Pick one thing your firm does, ask “why” three times, and see if there’s a real answer underneath. If there isn’t, you’ve found folklore.
;-)
Ernie
P.S. In the Inner Circle, we spend a lot of time poking at this stuff together — the practices everyone assumes are necessary, and the ones that turn out to be folklore.
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