The Struggle for Hours

The billable hour is the bane of the existence of most civil attorneys. In order to HONESTLY bill the requisite 8.5 hours per day, an attorney usually must work 10-12 hours per day. Now, as one gets more efficient in one's work, the number of total hours that needs to be worked decreases until one can almost work an 8.5 hour day and bill for 8.5 hours. Until that point, however, younger lawyers (especially first years such as myself) struggle to to work diligently on projects while taking care to bill clients ONLY for hours that have been put into their specific projects. Of course, I am not going to knock the amount of hours that I have to work (well, not much). My firm compensates me quite well for my work. However, when I think of the actual amount of money that I get paid in relation to the salary that I am paid, the benefits appear to be less and less. There have been too many canceled plans with friends and loved ones and more than my share of working weekends.

I have reached the halfway point of my first year as an attorney (well, billable year, anyway). My firm's requirements for hours are 2000 billable hours (not too bad in a world where 2300-2800 per year is not unheard of, especially in the current economic climate). Today, I realized that my current workload is extremely light. I was worried. Though I know that, with the oncoming deluge of litigation I would again be busy, what was I going to do in the meantime? How would I make my hours? It was this fear that prompted me to tabulate the hours I have worked thus far. The result? So far, in 6 months, I have worked 1100 hours (billable).

Sweet.

What that means is that I am 100 hours ahead of pace. That equates to TWO WEEKS OF VACATION?

Yeah, I am done sweating my light workload for the rest of the week.

Namby, break out the 20 year old Macallan...

UPDATE:

A meeting today with the partner in charge of a big case (one that will engage me for years to come) pulled the trigger on a lot of activity. My chances of me billing my minimum hours TWO MONTHS IN ADVANCE just went way up. This will teach me to complain and worry about hours....