A contingency firm is paid when a case ends, and only if it ends well. Until then it pays for the case in the hours of its own lawyers.
Hours are the inventory
Ask a plaintiff-side partner how many cases the firm can carry, and the honest answer is a number of hours. Every case draws on the same pool of lawyer time. The firm takes as many cases as that pool can staff and turns away the rest. Some of the rest are good cases. Nobody had the hours. The cases it turns away leave no docket, so the firm never sees the total.
What a motion costs
A motion to compel arbitration lands in a case that was moving well. The partner looks at the calendar, and something else gets pushed.
The firm does not control that calendar. The other side does. Motions do not arrive evenly. When two land in the same week, the firm short of hours decides which case waits. A motion to dismiss, a motion to compel, a motion for summary judgment: each lands on the defense’s schedule, with a deadline attached. Answering one means rereading the record, researching the law, building the argument, drafting, revising and checking every citation. That is days of work, and the days come out of another case.
The usual way to price a motion is by the bill, so many hours at the lawyer’s rate. A contingency firm sends no bill. What it spends is calendar. So the price of a motion is the case that did not get worked while the motion was answered.
Defense counsel bills by the hour. The plaintiff’s firm answers on its own time. A defendant who understands that does not need to win the motion. It needs the motion answered, then the next one, then the one after. The motion can be weak. The days it costs are real. Stack enough of them and you have a war of attrition, fought on the plaintiff’s calendar.
When the answer stops costing days
Your swarm builds the whole answer, and no one at the firm has to start it. An ordinary opposition to a motion to dismiss is done in an hour or less. Opposing summary judgment, the heaviest work in a case, takes about a day. Your lawyers review what comes out, decide what the firm argues, and sign.
The work does not get lighter. It moves, off your lawyers’ desks. The clock matters for one reason: it decides how many days go back to the firm. Review is still work, and your lawyers still own every decision. It is not production.
What the firm can afford
The same team carries more cases. A firm’s ceiling is a count of hours, and hours that no longer go to production are available for the next case.
Cases that were too expensive to litigate come back into range. Every partner knows the kind: a sound claim, a defendant with deep pockets, and a motion practice that would have eaten the calendar. The claim was never the obstacle. The projected hours were. When the motions stop costing days, the arithmetic of taking the case changes.
The firm is harder to wear down. A defendant who files motion after motion is betting the firm will run out of days first. That is a worse bet for the defendant when the days do not run out.
What does not change
Your lawyers still read the draft, decide what the firm argues, and sign. Docket Entry is a technology company, not a law firm, and it promises no result in any case. It says nothing about what a case is worth or how it will end.
The question that moves
A firm asks two questions before it takes a case. Is the claim good? Can the firm afford to litigate it? The first belongs to your lawyers, and it still does. Docket Entry changes the second.