Out of Billable Work & Terrified Forum

[Anonymous User]

I'm a fourth year transactional associate at a regional firm - title says it all. My small team is usually slammed with transactions. We're usually slow in late January through February & then, beginning March 1, we're drowning in work until the following January. This year followed the same pattern: slow late January, slow February, and then deals started pouring in first week of March....and then every single deal got paused.

I have no billable work. I flagged this for the head of the transactional group & he flagged it for firm leadership. So far, the firm is doing well financially so they've told me not to worry. The firm, for now, does not expect to do any layoffs or salary cuts & they expect transactions will pick back up this summer. That has NOT made me feel better. Every day I don't have billable work I (a) become less & less valuable to the firm and (b) fall further behind on my hours for the year.

I've tried reaching out to other groups at my firm to see if they could use an extra hand - no one has said yes because (for obvious reasons) they want to keep the work for themselves. I'm doing some regulatory review for my firm's leadership and am updating my department's document forms, but I'm getting increasingly anxious. Any other recommendations for things I can do that I haven't already done?

[nealric]

Best you can do is make yourself useful in any way you can, even if it's non-billable. Write articles, update forms, help with business development.

Sometimes when work dries up for an associate, it's because partners don't want to work with them. That's clearly not the case now when there's no work for anybody in the group. Nobody knows how long it will take, but the deals will eventually come back.

[Anonymous User]

I'm also sitting here with effectively no billable work (maybe 5 hours last week?) in a specialty group at a lower v100. Writing as many alerts as I can, updating forms, and doing whatever other non-billable work I can find, but still not adding up to a ton of hours in general. While I'm not panicking yet, definitely have reached out to recruiters who seem to think some firms are being aggressive in hiring during this nonsense.

[Anonymous User]

I'm also sitting here with effectively no billable work (maybe 5 hours last week?) in a specialty group at a lower v100. Writing as many alerts as I can, updating forms, and doing whatever other non-billable work I can find, but still not adding up to a ton of hours in general. While I'm not panicking yet, definitely have reached out to recruiters who seem to think some firms are being aggressive in hiring during this nonsense.

Do you have any additional info on the kinds of firms that are currently being aggressive in hiring? E.g., practice areas, location, size, or any other specifics.