The author of Prozac Nation (her memoirs), she has a JD from Yale and used to work with David Boies at Boies Schiller. 'The amount of inefficiency at big law firms is incredible,' she says in an interview with the Business of Law section at Bloomberg. She suggests that this is not done on purpose, although it is aided by using hourly billing. 'Much of what anybody does at a law firm, actually there is no use for,' she says, describing how different people might be researching the same issues and saying how easy it was to research different issues as 'the billable hour is the enemy of efficiency'.

Entrenched

Although she enjoyed some of her experience at Boies Schiller, she seems to have found it fruitless. Even the arrival of alternative billing would be unlikely to bring in change, in her view - as the current culture is so deeply engrained. 'They really should change,' she says. 'But you'd have to start all over again. As long as it's the same law firms, you'd to start all over again. It's entrenched.' Source: Bloomberg