Vetting Not Included

One hopes the new Administration’s homeland security policy will be less porous than its inauguration invite list:

One of the religious leaders invited to address Barack Obama’s inaugural prayer service Wednesday heads an Islamic group named by federal prosecutors as a co-conspirator in a terrorism-fundraising trial in Texas.
Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, is scheduled to join Christian ministers and Jewish rabbis offering prayers for the new president and his family during a service at the National Cathedral in Washington, organizers announced Friday.
Mattson’s group calls itself “the largest Muslim umbrella organization” in North America. However, in May 2007, federal prosecutors included ISNA on a list of nearly 300 co-conspirators filed in a criminal case charging that the Holy Land Foundation of Richardson, Texas, funneled more than $12 million to Hamas.
The U.S. government designated Hamas as a terrorist group in 1995.
A trial in Dallas in 2007 for the foundation and five of its leaders ended with acquittals and mistrials. However, Holy Land and the five officials were convicted of all 108 charges in a second trial last year.

More background on Mattson herself here and here.
There are two possibilities here. One is that the Obama people simply didn’t check out Ms. Mattson’s background, which seems doubly implausible given that she spoke at the Convention in August. The other is that they have deliberately taken sides against DOJ’s view of the Holy Land case (that’s surely how the targets of that investigation will view the invitation – as a vindication that their activities are no longer frowned upon), and implicitly against the broader project of Justice’s efforts to shut down the laundering of funds through Islamic charity groups inside the U.S. That’s a very dangerous signal indeed.

Billable Hourly

The American Lawyer continues that hardy perennial of legal journalism, “the death of the billable hour is at hand!”, with a look at some clients ditching hourly billing in the UK. But even the article admits that replacing the billable hour requires swimming against the tide in the UK:

In the United Kingdom, lawyers and clients have never had the same all-consuming obsession with hourly billing as their American peers. Still, over the last 20 years hourly rates have become the dominant currency here as well

As I have argued before here and here, while it’s true that lawyers and clients alike tend to despise hourly billing (albeit for different reasons), at the end of the day, (1) it persists because you can’t replace it without alternatives that have serious potential problems of their own, and (2) no matter how creative lawyers may be in proposing alternative billing structures, they will only catch on if clients provide the impetus for change, which in turn will happen only if clients are comfortable that they are able to meaningfully evaluate the cost-effectiveness of lawyer services, which most clients can do with hourly bills from long experience. The vast amounts of ink spilled on this topic every year almost always fail to grapple with those basic dynamics.
Edmund Burke, the great conservative theorist, famously remarked that “[a] state without some means of change is without the means of its conservation,” and that’s as true in the law or any business as it is in government or culture – an attitude that all change is always bad is a very dangerous one. But the fact remains that in trying to change any entrenched practice, you have to start by asking why things are the way they are and how your proposed alternative is going to deal with those conditions. We’d all love to see the hoary old billable hour interred, but legal journalism that advocates change in the industry without grappling with those realities doesn’t end up accomplishing very much for the profession of law.