One hundred ninety thousand four hundred billed

(sorry)

If you’re like many lawyers in private practice, you measure a year in billable hours, because at the end of the day that’s how you get paid (directly or indirectly, or a combination). I’m not going to use this space to rail for or against the billable hour—most of my work is hourly and there is something to be said for cold math, but plenty of my colleagues utilize contingency, flat fee, and/or hybrid agreements because their work lends itself to those arrangements.

Want to know how others measure a year? Per an Am Law 100 survey (paywalled; another summary here ), Fish & Richardson clocked in with 1,916 billable hours per lawyer, the highest average among those surveyed. 1,900 per lawyer is a whole lot—you know that the hours are not evenly spread through the ranks, and associates’ minimum and bonus expectations are generally higher (take a look at the Above The Law bonus round-up—bonus thresholds at some firms are 2,400-2,500 hours).

Some people go to extremes, or at least purport to. One enterprising and anonymous soul at Fox Rothschild apparently recorded 4,200 billable hours. A current Big Law partner has been suspended for, among other things, over-billing clients resulting in 3,173 hours in a single year (plus recording another 720 in non-billable work) at her former firm.

For reference, a non-leap year is 8,760 hours and theoretically we’re supposed to spend 2,920 of them sleeping. An average full-time non-lawyer job is about 2,000 hours a year, give or take.

I realize I’m not coming at this from a BigLaw background. (I mean, I’m coming at this from a place that lets me put their logo at the top of a blog while referring to Rudy Giuliani as a fool, so…)

But still. This is not a sustainable pace. Even 2,500 billable hours isn’t a 50-hour workweek; you can’t bill all of your time. (Yale Law School’s Career Development Office has a short article on the subject, though I don’t think anyone who is billing more than 2,000 hours is taking a daily hour-long duty free lunch or taking CLE that isn’t streaming, muted, in a tiny window in the lower corner of their screen.)

Now, the partner who billed 3,173 hours was suspended not because she kept an unsustainable pace, but because she was found to have falsified and inflated hours, charged clients for work she didn’t do, and entered her time as work by associates. She is appealing her suspension and has claimed that the over-billing was not intentional, just sloppy. (Note: Your clients who you overcharged will still want their money back for “sloppy.”) And this is sadly common—a need to bill huge numbers of hours (whether due to externally imposed requirements or competition or what have you) can lead to mistakes, or padding, or worse. (Then-Professor, now Hon. Patrick Schiltz has a widely taught article on the subject; it’s 20 years old but I think it’s still very valid.)

There have been weeks where my pace, if annualized, would hit 3,200 or maybe even 4,200. Weeks involving trial, or some of the sudden, last-minute weird stuff I do. And that can be a lot of fun while I’m immersed (no really), but I am not a pleasant person to others during those weeks. Adrenaline and Luna bars are not a balanced diet. Measuring a year “in midnights, in cups of coffee” isn’t great when you’re consuming many of the latter while counting the former at your desk. Sometimes super-intense is necessary; I can’t imagine doing it all of the time with an angry partner screaming at me for not doing more. I can’t imagine being that angry partner screaming at someone else for not doing more.