Bell & Manning, LLC

Our experiences working at a large law firm led us to adopt a business model that eliminates financial incentives that are misaligned with our clients’ interests.  We believe this distinguishes us from the vast majority of other law firms – even other small law firms. Our model has three important components.

First, no employee in our law firm, including attorneys and paralegals, is required to bill a minimum number of “billable hours” per year. That is, we have completely eliminated the billable hour requirement. This eliminates the pressure and incentive to maximize hours billed on a project without regard to the value added by those hours.

Second, although our attorneys work collaboratively and share our extensive knowledge and experience for the benefit of our clients, we have eliminated the categories of “billing attorney” and “working attorney”. Therefore, your projects will not be associated with a billing attorney who gets a percentage of the revenue (or a portion of “billing credit”) from the project, without regard to their substantive contribution of the project. This eliminates internal pressure and incentives to maximize budgets and minimize write-offs, without regard for the true value of the legal services rendered. 

Third, and perhaps most importantly, we are not trying to grow a legal empire. Our vision for Bell & Manning, LLC is to remain a small law firm with a reliable flow of work from a loyal, long-term client base. This allows us to focus on providing the greatest value to our clients, rather than focusing our time and skills on drumming up new business, long-term growth planning, hiring and personnel management, and other distractions that do not enhance – and may detract from – the quality of our legal services. 

 We believe these components of our business model, which emphasize personalized service, quality of work product and results delivered over sheer profitability, is mutually beneficial for our law firm and our clients and is critical to building long term, collaborative relationships.