I have been reading Steven Levy's book Legal Project Management with interest. In my opinion, project management is so tightly intertwined with value pricing, that any firm undertaking an alternative pricing exercise without recourse to project management techniques is substantially increasing their risk of failure. Part of good project management is establishing metrics to measure success or failure.
Hourly billing highlights the problems of the focus of law firms on input metrics, typically the number of billable hours. These metrics bear no relationship to the output metrics which are important to the client, namely result, value, communications and those other intangibles which are tied to client satisfaction.