How many hours a day are you at your SA? How many billable? Forum

[Anonymous User]

I'm curious to hear about how many hours other summers are spending at the office, billing, etc. Are most of your projects billable to clients, or are they non-billable?

[Br3v]

It's going to be firm dependent, and the amount that any of this matters will be firm dependent as well.

From what I remember about my SA I was at the office from 9:30/10-5:30 ish minimum (rarely would stay past that, but never really considered leaving before 5:30, maybe 5, though I heard plenty of fellow SA did no problem) and maybe 60-70% of that time was spent working on projects. They always had a project code to track but sometimes the work wasn't actually billable, just summer associate work.

[lavarman84]

Thus far, I spend 10-11 hours a day at the office and generally bill somewhere between 5 and 8 hours depending on how close deadlines are. It's probably 50/50 in terms of billable and non-billable but I figure that all my billable hours get written off.

[Slytherpuff]

One week in so far. I'm in the office for about 9-10 hours a day, sometimes up to 12 if there's a social event in the evening. I'm also currently split 50/50 between billable and non-billable stuff, but I think I'll be billing more as the summer goes on since we've had orientation stuff throughout the week.

[Anonymous User]

I "billed" about 25 hours this week with 20 non-billables or so. It's tough to find the time to do actual work because of all the socialization they want us to do during the day

[jkpolk]

If you bill 60 hours over the whole summer, that's a lot.

[First Offense]

I billed 15 "billable" all summer. Probably about 200 hours spent on actual work total, but a lot of it was drafting and researching client development shit.

[stannis]

In office 11-13.
"Bill" 9-10
Bill (goes to client) ~3

That last one is hard to say. Some matters I won't even get a matter number and just go straight to admin. Others will be small assignments I do in a few hours with a matter number so I'd imagine the client pays those (generally research memos on large matters). Others, I have a matter number but spend way more than I should so I'd guess the client pays for a chunk of those hours.

[soj]

.

[stannis]

In office 11-13.
"Bill" 9-10
Bill (goes to client) ~3

That last one is hard to say. Some matters I won't even get a matter number and just go straight to admin. Others will be small assignments I do in a few hours with a matter number so I'd imagine the client pays those (generally research memos on large matters). Others, I have a matter number but spend way more than I should so I'd guess the client pays for a chunk of those hours.

Clients hate paying for research memos (most of them just wanna be told what they need to do right now in the first sentence of an email) and they definitely will not tolerate being billed for summers doing a memo. Your memo is probably just a duplication of what an associate has already researched. In all likelihood, your client doesn't know that a summer did any work for him--if he does, he has been reassured that it will be written off. None of this is to diminish your hard work on the assignment, but I think you are overestimating your billed to billable ratio.

Yeah, you very well might be right about what clients pay for. I'm not in biglaw if that changes your estimation though.

The bolded I think is true in some cases. There are times when I feel like I'm looking for a unicorn case that nobody else could find and that doesn't exist. But there are others where a fairly straightforward issue comes up and a partner (smaller firm, so most of my work comes from partners) needs to know what the law says and what the caselaw is, so I'll get an ASAP assignment. In those cases, I don't think of doing duplicative work just to be tested or to be given something to do,