Christopher S. Marks of Williams Kastner in Seattle was recently interviewed by the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel in "Managing Litigation Costs in Difficult Times". In response to a question on segmenting fixed fees into various phases and billing for those one by one rather than total, Christopher Marks replies, "Even where we haven't scheduled a flat fee program and are continuing on the regular hourly rate, we structure our litigation plans and our budgets so that there are identifiable benchmarks within the litigation that we track against the budget."