Using an appearance or per diem attorney offers you at least four advantages that, in the end, might offer you cost savings.

The first advantage is simply having someone replacing you.  If you didn’t have the option of an appearance attorney, you might have to adjourn a matter, and, in some courts, and some parts, an adjournment might add months to the final resolution of a case.  Delays cost you money.  So, if an appearance attorney can help you move a case along, that appearance attorney is saving you money.

The second advantage is flexibility.  You use and pay for an appearance attorney when and if you need an appearance attorney.  The only real alternative to an appearance attorney is an associate, but, unlike an appearance attorney, if you have no need for the help of an associate, you either have to continue paying the associate, or sacrifice the investment you made in recruiting, hiring and employing the associate.

The next advantage is a kind of economies of scale effect.  In microeconomics, the term economies of scale refers to the way volume of production might affect the cost per unit of producing something.  Basically, as your plant produces more, you can probably expect the cost of producing each unit to go down.  When talking about per diem appearances, you see something similar.  

Let’s say you have one preliminary conference one morning.  Although the process of negotiating the preliminary conference order might take only, say, 30 minutes, you know you are going to spend most, if not all, of the morning on that preliminary conference.  You have the extra commute to the courthouse, and then the expected commute to your office.  You might have to spend several hours just waiting for your adversary or adversaries, and more time basically waiting on line to submit the draft order.  And then, unexpected things happen in court that might make an all morning appearance an all day appearance.

Now, the appearance or per diem attorney hopes to spend all morning at the courthouse, but unlike you, the appearance attorney has (or at least hopes to have) several assignments that morning.  So, let’s say the appearance attorney has three assignments at that courthouse on this morning.  In effect, the cost in time for each appearance to the per diem attorney is one-third of the cost to you.  Volume reduces the cost per appearance.  You make one appearance in a morning.  The appearance attorney makes three appearances in the same amount of time.  

When you hire an appearance or per diem attorney to cover a conference, you get to benefit from this time-saving phenomenon.  The appearance attorney passes on at least part of the time savings in the fee charged to you. Further, if you have the appearance attorney report time to you, you might be able to bill for the appearance attorney’s time, and your client would benefit in that, instead of charging your client for an entire morning on one appearance, you get to bill the client for one-third of a morning.

Another benefit that an appearance or per diem attorney may provide you is knowledge.  You might only rarely get to a courthouse.  An appearance attorney appears in that same courthouse often, if not daily.  Because of the time the appearance attorney spends in a courthouse, the appearance attorney picks up things that you are much less likely to learn.  An appearance attorney might know to go to one part first thing in the morning, knowing that litigants can get in an out of that part quickly.  And then, the attorney may know to save appearances in another part because that part does not get going until later in the morning.  One part might be fast.  Another can be very slow.  One part follows a calendar of cases in alphabetical order.  Another part might be first-come-first-serve.  One part follows a very rigid set of procedures.  Another is very flexible.  The amount of time saved by this knowledge might very well allow an appearance attorney to handle more assignments, or spend less time in court than might be expected from your experience.  Either way, this knowledge represents a reduction in costs, which might also be passed on to you.