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Lets say you bill 8 hours in one day for a client. However, when reviewing the bills before sending to client, the partner slashes some of the hours you billed that one day to 6 hours. For purposes of year end bonus and etc., will you have billed 8 or 6 hours that day?

At least at my firm, you get credit for the hours you bill, not for what gets sent to the client, otherwise ITE there might not be many hours for first and second years

It really depends, but generally speaking the amount of billable time you enter into the system is what "counts."

Sometimes you hear the distinction described as billable hours vs collectible hours. Small firms seem to focus more on collectibles and big firms more on billables, from an associate standpoint.

There are at least three ways of looking at it. Billable. Billed. Collected. What you write down is billable since you can ethically bill the client. Billed is what actually gets sent. And collected is what actually get paid.

Most big firms use billable. A couple, knobbe comes to mind, use billed. But you get a cut of the billed hours so it's not bad at all.

Building on what Desert Fox has said, here's what generally matters:

New Associates: They look at your Billable Hours. At this point, it is OK if some of the work you do gets written off as long as you are learning and becoming an efficient attorney in the process.
Senior Associates: They start looking at your efficiency as a consideration for your bonuses and long term prospects to evaluate you as an attorney. Efficiency is Billed to Billable ratio. You are expected to bill high hours and have very little of it written off.
Partners: In addition to billing, you are responsible for collections of those bills. However, by this time, hours collected are just one part of your compensation consideration (e.g. business development)

Desert Fox wrote:Most big firms use billable. A couple, knobbe comes to mind, use billed. But you get a cut of the billed hours so it's not bad at all.

Knobbe seems to be extremely generous about how they treat hours, though: they count each vacation day as 7.5 hours.

Anonymous User wrote:

Desert Fox wrote:Most big firms use billable. A couple, knobbe comes to mind, use billed. But you get a cut of the billed hours so it's not bad at all.

Knobbe seems to be extremely generous about how they treat hours, though: they count each vacation day as 7.5 hours.

I thought that was pretty standard.

NinerFan wrote:

Anonymous User wrote:

Desert Fox wrote:Most big firms use billable. A couple, knobbe comes to mind, use billed. But you get a cut of the billed hours so it's not bad at all.

Knobbe seems to be extremely generous about how they treat hours, though: they count each vacation day as 7.5 hours.

I thought that was pretty standard.

I don't think it's standard to get vacation days counted towards your billable goals. Many firms let you take as many vacation days as you want, but you still gotta hit dat 2000.

Anonymous User wrote:

Desert Fox wrote:Most big firms use billable. A couple, knobbe comes to mind, use billed. But you get a cut of the billed hours so it's not bad at all.

Knobbe seems to be extremely generous about how they treat hours, though: they count each vacation day as 7.5 hours.

Skadden uses the billed system too.