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I have a question regarding billable hours. As a first year litigation associate, what percentage of your hours can you count on being billable? Asked another way, how many hours per week, on average, would it take to bill 40 hours?

Not litigation focused, but it should be useful nonetheless.

http://www.law.yale.edu/studentlife/cdo ... lehour.htm

There's not really formula or anything. If you're working on billable matters, bill the time you work. If the billing partner wants to right off your time, that's his business. But, we aren't nuclear power plants, operating at 73.4% efficiency.

It's more a question of 1) how often do you not have the motivation to do work / get distracted and so waste time and 2) how many non-billlable commitments do you have.

On the second point, this will vary wildly by firm, I suspect, but something like 5 hours per week on average might be typical. Department lunches, CLEs, in-office trainings, entering your time, recording your time, responding to non-billable emails, attending summer events, driving to and from work (if you count that as "work")... it can add up. Also, if your firm doesn't count pro-bono as billable but nonetheless encourages you to do it, that can also be a time commitment. At the peak of summer when you have 3 summer events a week + 2 summer lunches a week + a bunch of other stuff, you could easily spend 10-15 hours on non-billable stuff.

On the first point, it partially depends on you, the cases your on, and, I suspect, the face time requirement at the firm. If you get in to work at 8:50, are you the kind of guy (or girl) who strolls in, gets a cup of coffee, reads cnn.com / espn.com / abovethelaw.com for thirty minutes as you wake up? Similarly, do you get coffee every few hours, text your GF, talk with your buddy down the hall, etc? None of that is billable, but you're at work and if you think of that stuff as "working", well, then it could easily waste 1-2 hours per day. The second and third points are interrelated (projects + face time requirement). If you are given a lot of small tasks and your firm has a strong face-time requirement, you'll be stuck at the office even when you aren't working. On the other hand, if you're often given 2-week long projects and the firm has no problem with you leaving at 5:00, having dinner with your wife and kids, then getting back online at 8:00, well, there's no reason you can't be 100% efficient while at home. I'm lucky that way, and I can lock myself in my home-office and do work. If I get tired of doing that, I go back into the main room and watch TV or whatever. No reason I can't work in my home-office while I'm at my home-office. I can't speak from personal experience on this point, but my guess is that if you're at a firm with an implied requirement that you stay at the office from 8:00 - 7:00 every day, you'll get mentally fried by about 4:30 and your efficiency will drop. By that I mean you tell yourself "fuck it" and read espn for an hour, then feel guilty, and get back to work.

IME, around 80% of my office time is billable. Of course it varies according to circumstances.

It depends on a wide variety of stuff.

How much work you have in general. Until March I was billing like 50 hours A MONTH. I still went to work 50 hours a week. Some days I'd have nothing, then get an assignment and stay late to finish. Now that I've got some hours under my belt I am comfortable leaving at 4pm but then I wasn't.

The busier you are, the more efficient you become. If you have work all the time, you don't have to spend time at your desk. If you have one mega case, you can often just bill 50 hours a week whenever you want.

How efficient you are? Do you espn/jezibell/reddit/tls/fashionblog/pronblog 15 minutes every hour.

Do you stop the clock doing short distractions?

Do you cut your own hours.

randoname wrote:I have a question regarding billable hours. As a first year litigation associate, what percentage of your hours can you count on being billable? Asked another way, how many hours per week, on average, would it take to bill 40 hours?

There's a subtext to this question that I feel the need to point out: that you can plan to "bill 40 hours." That's not how a 2,000 hours target works. You do the work you're assigned. You just do it. If you dodge too much work, you get a bad review. If you're the poor asshole that gets staffed on the case that generates multiple 300-hour months, well then looks like you're billing 2,500 hours this year.

rayiner wrote:

randoname wrote:I have a question regarding billable hours. As a first year litigation associate, what percentage of your hours can you count on being billable? Asked another way, how many hours per week, on average, would it take to bill 40 hours?

There's a subtext to this question that I feel the need to point out: that you can plan to "bill 40 hours." That's not how a 2,000 hours target works. You do the work you're assigned. You just do it. If you dodge too much work, you get a bad review. If you're the poor asshole that gets staffed on the case that generates multiple 300-hour months, well then looks like you're billing 2,500 hours this year.

I've sort of wondered about that myself. As an associate, particularly a first year associate, you're not really the person bringing the business, so in that sense, your hours seem pretty dependent on the partners you're working for.

So, are the billable hours really just a proxy/objective measure of how much the partners like/trust you to do work? And if you don't meet the goals/requirements, that's essentially just a sign that nobody trusts you to do work and that you should be let go?

.

randoname wrote:

rayiner wrote:

randoname wrote:I have a question regarding billable hours. As a first year litigation associate, what percentage of your hours can you count on being billable? Asked another way, how many hours per week, on average, would it take to bill 40 hours?

There's a subtext to this question that I feel the need to point out: that you can plan to "bill 40 hours." That's not how a 2,000 hours target works. You do the work you're assigned. You just do it. If you dodge too much work, you get a bad review. If you're the poor asshole that gets staffed on the case that generates multiple 300-hour months, well then looks like you're billing 2,500 hours this year.

I've sort of wondered about that myself. As an associate, particularly a first year associate, you're not really the person bringing the business, so in that sense, your hours seem pretty dependent on the partners you're working for.

So, are the billable hours really just a proxy/objective measure of how much the partners like/trust you to do work? And if you don't meet the goals/requirements, that's essentially just a sign that nobody trusts you to do work and that you should be let go?

It totally depends. They're a proxy for how busy the firm is, how busy your practice group is, how much people like working with you individually, random chance as to whether you get on a matter that blows up, etc., etc.

The main point is that you shouldn't go in thinking "I have to bill 2000 hours so I'll work 50 hours a week and bill 40." You have very limited control over how much you'll work in any given day, week, month, or year. It won't be 9-7 every day; it'll be 9-7, 9-5, 8-10, sometimes you'll leave Friday and barely check your phone until Monday, sometimes you'll bill 15 hours on Sunday. Trying to pro-rate it over the year gives the impression that it will be predictable and regular, which is wrong.

rad lulz wrote:

dixiecupdrinking wrote:IME, around 80% of my office time is billable. Of course it varies according to circumstances.

Yeah this would be pretty normal for me

If I'm jumping around from random thing to random thing then its harder

If im supporting a sr associate or partner last minute w a filing or something and on a short deadline I can bill 8 hours in 8 hrs

Yup definitely.

There's those 95% days where I tap into a reserve attention span I didn't know I had.

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