The Billable Hour

It is after 10:00pm on a Saturday night. I am at the office because, alas, today is the last day of January which means my time for the month is due. Naturally, our fancy web-based system for entering time is malfunctioning so I'm writing everything out by hand, but that's a whole other story.

Back to my point...
The only lawyers who don't hate billable hours are the ones who don't have billable hours. For the rest of us, the notion of having to keep track of every last thing we do--in six minute increments nonetheless--is perhaps one of the worst parts of this job. Worse than the stress. Worse than the long hours (though, I submit, the long hours are causally related to this inane practice of billing time because you're rewarded for sacrificing your family and social life to stay later and bill more hours).

The amount of hours you bill determines when you make partner, whether you get a bonus or a raise (and how much it will be), and often it determines whether or not you even get to keep your job. At my firm, the bare minimum is 1,900 hours per year (roughly 160 per month, 38 per week, or 8 per day). Compared to that which is expected of most lawyers in Manhattan, where a yearly requirement of 2,200 or more isn't unheard of, I've got it easy.

And sure, it sounds easy enough, right? Eight hours a day is what everyone works. But if you've ever had to bill time in a law firm, you know that it often takes ten hours in the office to actually bill eight hours. And then there are days where you mysteriously bill only four hours, or something else equally embarrassing. So that means that the next week, instead of working from 9am-7pm so you can try to bill eight hours just to stay on target, you're working from 9am-9pm to try to bill ten hours to make up for that day you had your head in the clouds. The cycle is vicious and neverending.

Yet in these economic times, there is apparently a rapidly spreading notion that the end of the billable hour is near. [insert two strains of the Hallelujah Chorus here] After all, why are we asking our clients--who already struggle just to be able to afford the cost of litigation--to pay us more money when it takes us longer to get the job done?

For a more insightful take on this development than I'm able to give right now (given that I still have five more days worth of time to enter before I go home tonight), check out this New York Times article from last week.