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how many hours a day do you have to work to meet an 8 hour billable hour requirement?

You have to work enough hours that 8 of them were billed.

Seriously, this is going to vary massively from person to person and from day to day.

Depends on a lot of factors, including how efficient you are, how distraction-prone you are, how busy you are (you’re more efficient when you’re busy), the kind of work you’re doing (you can bang out 8 hours of doc review in 8.5 hours), and how many matters you’re working on throughout the day (switching tasks = lost time and leakage), whether you eat lunch at your desk, and more. All that said, I’d say 10 hours is about average.

If I don't have to wait for work I usually can bill 8 hours in 8.5 to 9 hours. This includes eating while I work (we have a cafeteria in our building so not much down time getting lunch). But I don't get distracted very easy or do a lot of socializing.

I guess I've never heard of firms requiring daily billable hours--is that a thing or are you just averaging out what you estimate to be your daily billable hour requirement to meet your annual billable target?

Like cavalier and Tattered say, absolutely varies person to person, practice area, etc. Are you in lit, corporate, and what specific sub group?

I've had days that were so slow that I've only billed 1.5 hours, other days where I bill 18-20 hours back to back, so....in short, it varies. I'd say, for me, meeting 6 billable hours per day is not difficult, but it does become a little more difficult for me to consistently hit 8 hours daily, due to ups and downs of my projects/deals. It may also depend on how conservative you are in tracking hours (e.g. I know people who leave their timers running to go to the bathroom, but I don't) or how bill-sensitive your client is. Also re: billable v. working hours, I can be sitting at my desk for 10 hours, but only end up billing 6 hours, since the other 4 hours are spent with me waiting for emails from partners and senior associates.

JHP wrote:I guess I've never heard of firms requiring daily billable hours--is that a thing or are you just averaging out what you estimate to be your daily billable hour requirement to meet your annual billable target?

I've never heard of an actual 8-billables-per-day requirement either. I think I'd take a hard pass on any firm that had such a requirement. Even in the most consistent practice areas - T&E, patent prosecution - work comes and goes. It's entirely common and frankly unavoidable to have days where you bill well under 8 hours.

JHP wrote:It may also depend on how conservative you are in tracking hours (e.g. I know people who leave their timers running to go to the bathroom, but I don't) or how bill-sensitive your client is.

Unless folks are committing outright fraud (like, say, leaving their timer running while having coffee with a friend across the street), accounting "leniency" doesn't go all that far. Tracking bathroom time is going to add, I dunno, maybe 20-30 minutes total - at most - over the course of an entire day.

As for "bill sensitivity," I agree that cutting your own hours can actually be a huge issue. If you're routinely forced to cut, say, 50% of the actual time you work, that's massive.

QContinuum wrote:

JHP wrote:I guess I've never heard of firms requiring daily billable hours--is that a thing or are you just averaging out what you estimate to be your daily billable hour requirement to meet your annual billable target?

I've never heard of an actual 8-billables-per-day requirement either. I think I'd take a hard pass on any firm that had such a requirement. Even in the most consistent practice areas - T&E, patent prosecution - work comes and goes. It's entirely common and frankly unavoidable to have days where you bill well under 8 hours.

JHP wrote:It may also depend on how conservative you are in tracking hours (e.g. I know people who leave their timers running to go to the bathroom, but I don't) or how bill-sensitive your client is.

Unless folks are committing outright fraud (like, say, leaving their timer running while having coffee with a friend across the street), accounting "leniency" doesn't go all that far. Tracking bathroom time is going to add, I dunno, maybe 20-30 minutes total - at most - over the course of an entire day.

As for "bill sensitivity," I agree that cutting your own hours can actually be a huge issue. If you're routinely forced to cut, say, 50% of the actual time you work, that's massive.

Yeah the bathroom thing was only one example I could think of for people's varying timer practices (definitely not for grabbing coffee, though). For the bill-sensitivity, I was thinking more the opportunity for folks to bill to other matter numbers, like some business development billing codes that some firms use for junior associates when there's not necessarily work for the associate to do, but they can sit in on calls, read a merger agreement and bill to a non-client billing code.

It's hard for anyone to break 85% efficiency once you build in bathroom, coffee, 5-minute interruptions you can't control for (at least at my firm, we are told not to bill these .1s).

I'm a pretty inefficient and distractable person (AKA, I am on TLS right now), so for me, 8 billables is probably 11 actual office hours. It can vary wildly by the day, though.