June 5, 2006
How Many Billable Hours Are There?
If you haven’t read the paper titled The Truth About the Billable Hour by the Yale Law School Career Development Office, you should. The paper illustrates just how difficult is it for associates to accumulate the billable hour targets placed on them. Set the target too high, and a host of other important aspects of an associate’s life and career suffer: That can send retention plummeting through the cellar. The firm becomes a supply house for law firms who depend on laterals to fill their talent needs.
Goals need to consider more than just billable hours. There are seven areas where we can invest our limited time on this earth. If firms value their investment in associates, they will establish targets that recognize the importance of those seven areas when it comes to developing a well-rounded, productive member of the firm. What are those seven areas? They are job, family, religion, civic activities, health, recreation and self-development. These are competing choices for the limited amount of time available to us.
Our young associates are willing to shift a disproportionate amount to time to the job during the first few years, but there is a limit. In addition, what those associates value most is their professional development. Shortchange their development by over emphasizing the “billable hour goal”, and the associate’s tolerance for an exploitative work schedule dissipates even more quickly.
The difficulty of accumulating “billable hours” is also important from another aspect. It points to the importance of mining the law firm’s business looking for “defined scope opportunities” that can be marketed for a “fixed price,” making the law firm less dependent on the important, but income-limiting, billable hour.
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Filed under Alternative Billing, Leverage by Tom Collins