Ever hear of "double billing?" Look it up.

My favorite: while travelling on a plane for one client, you work on the file of another.

That's only the most blatant example.

Yeah, but no. I am sure that does happen, but it's not what you're making it out to be. A lot of clients won't pay for travel time, a fair amount of lawyers don't travel, etc.

As a general rule, you've got to work a lot more hours than you can bill. I am telling you this from personal experience, and based on the experiences of my peers. 1) All of your time isn't used efficiently and 2) even if it is, partners cut the hours of their associates. Oh, boy, do they cut hours (in my experience, which can vary).

A lot of that depends upon the firm, the client, the department within the firm, and the position of the billing attorney.

Young associates tend to work a boatload more hours than they can bill, because the people senior to them know they will take it in the shorts and smile. The client gets product, the bills get paid, and the firm gets its money's worth and then some from the poor bastard who's up to his ears in law school debt and trapped in a job he's growing to hate.

Insurance companies make difficult clients because they will nickel and dime billing to death until a four hour motion is worth thirty minutes. Since it was not the senior partner's four hours, he doesn't have to care, the ins. co. saves money, and the poor bastard above's wife starts delivering groceries to the firm.

Civil litigation is a slow process much of the time. A case may lie fallow for months while the plaintiff's decide what they feel like doing. In that time, there may be little to no value to be added to a case by the defense. Nevertheless, bills must be paid, and a senior associate delivers a file to a junior associate and says "here, bill something in this file."

The aforementioned poor bastard must now find a way to creatively bill an insurance company for work that didn't need doing in the first place on a file the insurance company in-house counsel hasn't had to care about for actual months. This is accomplished sometime on Saturday evening, while the poor bastard's wife is out drinking with the girls, wondering what happened to the idealistic young man she married. In two hours time, thirty minutes are billed, quite needlessly, as the law firm defends the insurance company for denying claims for unnecessary medical billing.

The above story is factually accurate, although the names and events have been slightly modified. The junior associate was born legitimately, and wasn't really all that poor until he quit his job to hang drywall instead.

Double billing has pretty much been a thing of the past for the last 15 years, when clients, wisely, stopped paying for travel time. They've also stopped paying for the time of all participants at meetings unless pre-authorized, for the time of first year associates, for copies, and for any number of other things. Mostly wisely, though not paying for young associate time is ultimately a bad idea.

I'm not denying double billing happened -- but the pressure to keep hours high was the very reason it did happen. You were (are) paid in large measure depending on how many hours you billed and people looking for edge, or partnership, billed when they could.

The nature of the thing is that if you are honest (and truly, most of us are), you have to work 2000-2100 hours to bill 1800. The most reasonable schedule I ever had in private practice was when I got to work at 8:30 or 9 and left at 7 3 days a week, and at 6 the other two. That was after I'd had a baby, so when she went to bed I worked for another hour or two.

Before that, it's pretty typical to stay at the office till 8 or later, and that was in the days before the billable hour pressure went higher. In larger markets than I worked in, it was pretty typical to be at the office till 10 and I've had conference calls with New York lawyers at 11 only recently.

It is a scourge indeed -- when I went in-house I burned a time sheet at my going away party. They stared enviously.

.. total billed hours is usually less than total worked hours - and down in the boiler room, substantially less.

I was merely trying to point out that billable hours and worked hours do not necessarily match on a one-for-one specific identification basis. Billing hours is an art; not a punch clock.

People tend to forget that a law firm is a business. Attorneys go to pointless meetings, spend time on business development, interview new hires, etc. All of this in non-billable time.

Double-billing is a thing of the past. Honest attorneys will always work more hours than they bill.

I think it is important to point out that the era of double billing is not that far behind us, and that it yielded kicking and screaming only under steady client protest. I knew lots of attorneys in the 1980s who had no problem convinving themselves that it was an ethical and defensible practice, even if they would prefer to not have to in fact defend it in the court of public (or client) opinion.

This tends to validate the essential premise of the slate article which is that the hourly billing system has some inherent conflicts with the client's best interest. The hourly billing system incents inflation and rationalization and provided no direct incentive for efficiency and expedience, save whatever expectations could be managed with the client.

This is coming from a CPA, whose industry was generally on a fixed bid system during that time period, and whose profession suffered increasing setbacks in effectiveness and public reputation as it too sought ways to inflate direct billable hours.

Find me an attorney, who in a large case, doesn't do work on a file while defending, say, a multi-defendant action. I'm sorry, while Defendant X Attorney is asking plaintiff about what they purportedly did wrong, Defendant Y attorney is billing the time for being at that dep as well as billing time on the file he brought with him. Been there, done that as I was required to.

Sure, in the end I worked more than I billed. But there were days when I worked 10 hours and billed 16. Every attorney has. Period.

rundeep:

The nature of the thing is that if you are honest (and truly, most of us are), you have to work 2000-2100 hours to bill 1800. The most reasonable schedule I ever had in private practice was when I got to work at 8:30 or 9 and left at 7 3 days a week, and at 6 the other two.

I'm trying to reconcile the billable targets I'm seeing here with the "killer" schedules I hear that lawyers have.

From these numbers, with a target of 1800 billed hours, you're working about 45 hours a week, based on your starting and finishing times. (Using your estimated yearly hours, 2100 hours actually worked / 50 weeks = 42 hours). That's low for a mid-level management position, and very low for a business owner. If the target is 2400 billable, I can see that the actual hours might go up proportionately, but more likely there is a fixed amount of overtime. Let's say, though, that you have to work 2800 to bill 2400: that's a 56-hour workweek. Not something your union would negotiate for, but still no more backbreaking than many other executive and professional jobs.

What am I missing? What are the layers who put in 80-hour weeks actually billing?

The fact that some lawyers double bill clients, doesn't mean that all of them do it all of the time. I have quite a few friends that are lawyers, and I know they usually end up working quite a few more hours than they're ever able to bill.

While the idea of flat billing per assignment or case or whatever sounds like a neat idea, in actual practice it can't work. Some projects, while they look the same from the outside, take different amounts of time to complete. Complicated facts, different laws, etc., can all add to the time it takes to complete something. If you charge the average amount of tim for "similar" projects, that's going to screw the client with the simple project, while giving a benefit to the one with the complicated one.

My mechanic charges me per hour. So does my accountant. I don't see why my lawyer shouldn't. I just keep an eye on him to make sure he isn't ripping me off. Just like I do on my mechanic and my accountant.

Wolfen:

My mechanic charges me per hour. So does my accountant. I don't see why my lawyer shouldn't. I just keep an eye on him to make sure he isn't ripping me off. Just like I do on my mechanic and my accountant.

My mechanic quotes me a price by the job. I need a new exhaust manifold. Part is $250, labor is $130, total $380. I don't care if it took him 1 hour or 6 hours, I still pay $380.

Legal work is probably not so cut and dried.

For the record, no one has had a target of 1800 for years -- even when I was a young tyke the target was 2000 billables, or 40 if based on a 50 week year. That sounds theoretically reasonable, except that the constraints of what you can actually bill for mean you have a tough time doing that.

Here's a typical day (in the old days) -- in the office at 8:30. Start reviewing correspondence (some of which is billable if directly related to a matter you are working on, some is more general, like about continuing education, the firm's initiatives, the summer associate program, new administrative rulings, important Supreme Court or governmental rulings related to your practice but not billable to any client). In the new information age, you can probably expect 20-30 substantive emails in your inbox like this before 9. It's 10:30 before you finish this process and maybe, maybe you can bill an hour.

Then you turn to the brief you've been writing and spend the next 3 hours editing and taking phone calls from clients. Some firms do not allow you to charge clients for general advice calls, (calls which do not relate directly to an open file) and you invariably get a minimum of 5 of those a day, which can be anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours.

After lunch (which you never bill unless you are eating in while working on something) there are meetings with other lawyers on the brief or on some other matter in the afternoon which last another 3 hours. But the client isn't paying for your time there because of their restrictions, so you've spent the last 3 hours on your own time. (Some firms will count this towards your billable target, but that's why they've raised the target to 2400 hours).

At 5, you are called about a pro bono matter, because everyone agrees this is good and you spend 90 minutes on that.

Now it's 6:30 and you haven't billed a whole lot of time, (maybe 5 or 6 hours) so you have to turn to some other file and work on it for at least 2 or 3 more hours in order to get your 8 billables in for the day. So you've been in the office from 8:30 to 9:30 and billed 8. That's really pretty typical -- the pro bono matter will be replaced by some other nonbillable event, like lawyer training, firm promotion, efforts to get new business, etc. on a daily basis.

13x5 days a week is 65 actual in-office hours, plus the work you do on the weekends, and everyone I knew worked at least 2 Saturdays a month.

It gets easier if you have one gigantic task to work on, but outside of the big NY firms, very few places have that luxury. If you are going to trial in a major case, you go from one witness prep to another, from the pretrial statement to the briefs, to supervising the way the exhibits are put together, etc. You generally aren't going to lunch and you aren't screwing around at the water cooler or mixing it up with friends in the office (all of which also happens at firms, and which lawyers did not bill.) So if I had a major matter, I might be able to bill 10 or 11 hours in that same 13 hour day.

For people who do transactional work, it can be the same -- many firms including some I worked at have overnight rooms where you can grab a few hours of sleep before coming back to your docs -- when deals have to close at a certain time, thousands of pages of complex docs have to be done on that schedule, and you have to be there to do it. You can easily bill 250 hours a month with a major transaction, but most lawyers will see only one or two of those a quarter. If there's 2, that would take you to 2000 hours, and the rest would consist of smaller transactions or pieces of advice.

Thanks for the clarification. So what you're saying is you need to work around 3200-3500 hours a year to bill 2000. That's a much larger actual/billed ratio than initially proposed.

I'm sure that car mechanics, for instance, don't have that kind of ratio.