A classier con.

Flim-flam and the practice of law are, as we all know, not strangers. And the fancier the law firm, the more refined are the hustles and cons it employs. Consider, for example, the art of billing the client. The object, of course, is to extract from the client the largest remotely feasible fee for services rendered.

One technique is called "block billing." A large number of tasks are lumped together without any breakdowns of how much time was devoted to each, and without any specific description of the task. Another is to use less-than-revealing descriptions of the work done. "Review documents" leaves to the imagination the exact nature of the documents. How many are one paragraph or one sentence, and how many are formidably opaque requiring weeks of close study?

Amtrak was recently found to be the victim of such billing in an audit reported by The Wall Street Journal's Nathan Koppel and Ashby Jones. Koppel and Jones discuss two possible reasons for Amtrak's failure to monitor its legal bills with appropriate zeal: A lawyer for one of the firms previously worked at Amtrak, so old pals at Amtrak may have been reluctant to question his firm's billing. And the Amtrak lawyer supervising another firm had previously worked at that firm, and may have hesitated to be churlish to his old friends.

My own experience suggests a third possibility. Imagine the senior partner of the outside law firm playing golf with Al, the in-house corporate lawyer overseeing the firm's work. As they stroll from the putting green for one hole to the tee for the next, the senior partner says something like this: "Al, I just want you to know that if you ever tire of the corporate rat race, there'll be a place for you at the firm."

Sometimes the partner doesn't have to be that explicit. Just hinting at such a conversation is enough to keep Al from too closely scrutinizing the firm's bill.