Record All Time vs Self Write-Down Forum

[Person1111]

There is an art to this, but “bill all your time unless told not to” is the correct default rule. You will eventually develop a sense of how long things “should” take and what sort of tasks are appropriate for someone at your level, and you can make downward adjustments appropriately.

Disagree. Yes, you develop a sense of how long things "should" take, but if a particular project takes significantly longer for whatever reason (aside from a genuine screwup on your part, like the forgetting-to-save-your-work-product example mentioned earlier ITT), the best way is to discuss with the senior, not to just keep your head down and "eat" your own time. The senior may suggest alternative approaches, narrow the scope of the work or greenlight the extra time. Like if I'm asked to research caselaw concerning apparently obscure issue X, and the senior anticipates finding maybe a dozen or two relevant cases nationwide when in fact there are thousands, I'd go to the senior and typically the senior would either greenlight additional time, or decide we should limit our review to relevant state Y instead of doing a nationwide search.

(If you are always taking more time than your yearmates, that calls for a different type of intervention. Again, just "eating" your own time to artificially "improve" your efficiency isn't the answer as working 1.5/2X as hard as your classmates while recording the same hours isn't sustainable over the long or even medium term.)

We can agree to disagree, although I'm not sure we actually disagree that much. I agree with you that, for a junior associate, getting into the habit of writing down your own time is a bad practice because you have no frame of reference for how long something "should" take and there's an expectation that you will spin your wheels and take a longer time to do things. As you get more senior, it is (at least sometimes) more valuable to keep your clients happy and not mess with the realization rates of the partners who feed you work than it is to capture 100% of your time.

[QContinuum]

We can agree to disagree, although I'm not sure we actually disagree that much. I agree with you that, for a junior associate, getting into the habit of writing down your own time is a bad practice because you have no frame of reference for how long something "should" take and there's an expectation that you will spin your wheels and take a longer time to do things. As you get more senior, it is (at least sometimes) more valuable to keep your clients happy and not mess with the realization rates of the partners who feed you work than it is to capture 100% of your time.

In that sense I agree, assuming you agree that even as a midlevel, writing down your own time (barring your own screwups) should be rare and not "routine". (And, in my personal view, there's a difference between, say, writing down less-than-totally-productive time spent discussing with a senior, which I'm personally more willing to do, and writing down totally-productive time I spend generating tangible work product).