The Billable Burden

Dearest A,

The Times has been dishing up some good tidbits for our blog the last couple of days -- the CIA tape-destruction investigation, the Supreme Court's thoughts on cruel and unusual punishment, a college's protests against the RIAA's draconian litigation policy. We'll get to those.

First, I want to talk about something near and dear to my heart: Billable hours.

The way firm lawyers bill their time is in six-minute increments. The expectation is that between billable and pro bono hours, associates will rack up at least 2,000 hours over the course of the year. That comes out to about 38.5 hours per week.

"Hold on!," you non-lawyers say. "I work more than that!"

Well, let me finish. If you take two weeks of vacation per year, that brings the number up to 40 hours. If you don't count the ten holidays you get a year, we're up to 41.7 hours per week.

And now this is where it all gets very tricky. Forty-two billable hours a week may not sound like much. But remember two things: 1) That's the MINIMUM. 2) That's the amount of time ACTUALLY SPENT WORKING. It does not count lunches, or bathroom breaks, or time spent blogging about your billable hours. It doesn't even count work-like things you do -- cleaning off your desk, preparing bills for clients, or doing the research a partner asked you to do for the article he's writing. It only counts actual legal work you perform for an actual client. To get those specific hours up to forty-two per week, associates are at their desks every day from 9:30 a.m. until 8 p.m. at an absolute minimum.

Is the incentive there to cheat? Absolutely. Anybody who says they haven't been tempted to leave their timer running is a big fat liar.

But I see an even bigger problem -- this system is a barrier to creativity. Your success is measured by how much time you bill compared with everyone else. But you also don't want to bill too much time, since a client will notice a large bill just as much as a partner will notice a small one.

This limits your options. You can write a motion in the same way, in the same amount of time, as everyone who has come before. Or you can think about it a little more, delve into it a little more, and suffer the consequences when you charge six hours for a task that takes everyone else three.

Measuring time is a wrong-headed way to measure success. Law firms will cling to it like a baby to a bottle because it makes them goggling amounts of money. But it will continue to make young associates miserable. It will continue to stifle innovation. And it will certainly drive lawyers out of law firms.

Love,
Sammy