Whatever. FF is a TTT in decline.

Wow. How do you Fried Frankers feel about this?

As someone working at FF, I really don't care. If anything, it will make my life easier, not having to try to figure out what I did a month ago. The worst part of the month is trying to get my time straight.

I'm sure more firms do this than just Fried Frank.

Kirkpatrick has a next day 2PM next day deadline. Those FFers have it cushy.

Whatever. FF is a TTT in decline.

Can someone explain to me why this is such a big deal?

This is nothing compared to Sullivan & Cromwell's policy. If you are delinquent in time reporting at S&C they reserve the right to cut your pay for the week to minimum wage and not restore any missing amounts.

It isn't

S&C has the policy, but you have way more than one business day to enter the time before you run afoul of the policy. You need to be really delinquent before they even notice.

It would be illegal (at least in NY) to withhold wages, which is why I presume the penalty for noncompliance is that you have to manually deposit your check (and thus have to wait a few days for funds to clear).

Any (serious) ideas/suggestions for career change?

"If you are delinquent in time reporting at S&C they reserve the right to cut your pay for the week to minimum wage and not restore any missing amounts."

Minimum wage. You're kidding, right?

Talk about working at the "bend over" law firm!

So glad I didn't accept the offer at Fried Frank.

"Carpe diem system?" That Justin Spendlove can turn a phrase. As might be expected from a guy whose name is a pun.

Remember, if you don't submit your time the partners can't spend. And you know how Justin loves to spend.

Those pictures are creepy; nice fake smiles . . . "Now get to work and make sure your time is entered, or else . . ."

Carpe Diem is a time entry program dipshit

Mandated daily timekeeping seems a bit over the top, but I think lots of firms require weekly reporting, with varying fines or penalties, depending on whether the firm is located in a state that prohibits mandatory withholding.

Even if the firm does not impose a penalty, would most associates think it is a good idea to be on a list of people who never comply with the timekeeping deadlines? I personally would rather not be on that list.

At my firm, all time for the given week is due posted by the next Monday before noon. All time for a month is due on the 1st of the next month before midnight. Oh, and all attys have to enter their own time with no secretarial help. The latter sucks. I really wish I could dictate it to my secretary, instead of having to deal with all those stupid codes...

Chicago Midlaw Assoc...

big deal

i used to work for a national, non-Big4 accounting firm (oh hell, it was clifton gunderson) and they required daily time entry, and no one got any admin support except partners, and the pay sucked.

but i entered mine weekly usually b/c the rainmaking partner i reported to thought the whole thing was stupid

At my firm, we report weekly. If you're delinquent, it's $20 a day. The fines collected get put in a drawing for the secretaries whose attorneys were all on-time.

It's not the potential $20/day that keeps me in line. It's the fear that my secretary will beat me senseless if she's not eligible for the timesheet fine drawing.

1) I bet the secretarial staff is "reading and willing to help"--as in they have no choice and would rather help than be fired.

2) Especially if they have a computerized system, why not just input the time yourself? It is ridiculous to write it out on a time sheet by hand and give it to someone else to enter.

3) Your wages can very much be cut if you are a salaried employee. If you work hourly, your wages cannot be denied to you for hours you have worked. But if you are salaried, then if you miss time that you were supposed to work, state labor laws often have a provision allowing an employer to withhold salary proportionally. And, I bet that new hires sign off on that particular agreement at S&C anyway, so that would simply be part of your employment agreement, and enforceable on that basis.

This is no big deal I'm sure most firms use some sort of electronic time tracking system like DTE. All I have to do is click a button on my computer and it starts tracking the time. Need to switch to another project? Just click another button.

Hey Lat - Do you really think this post needs a link to Above the Law's main page? Shameless.

At my firm someone is less likely to make partner if they are consistently lax in their time entry because it shows a lack of understanding/appreciation of the business side of the firm.

daily time entry is douchetastic. and as to tracking software, who has time to click buttons every time a different client calls?

FF can eat my farts.

12:31: that's a great policy. Brilliant, actually.

Amlaw 200 firm. Weekly time due by noon on Tuesday the following week. Monthly time due within a business day or so following end of month. Supposedly, missing weekly deadlines twice in a year can impact or negate bonus, but this policy is new.

wow, we have it good here in Texas ay my bigtex firm. We have to enter time only ONCE A MONTH!

mmm, fried frank

If you forget the time you actually worked when you enter it in the system and the result is a LOSS of billable time, you're not guestimating in the right direction my friends.

Top firm, due weekly. No biggy. Daily would be a PITA if you take a day off.

Lat - rather than this meaningless minutia, how about doing a piece on billing practices? there are far more interesting stories about and broader implications for a piece on overbilling - i.e. do you bill when you go to the bathroom? have you ever noticed that your partner seems to be billing continuously even though you've had a 40 minute conversation about his vacation in Buenos Aires?

Wow, I complain because our time is due bi-weekly. I guess I should be happy I don't work for any of these places. Nothing I want to do more than sit around and enter time after I've been in the office 12+ hours.

Our time is due by 4 pm the following business day. I write it out and my secretary enters my time. She's awesome and keeps me on top of things. I have no idea what happens if we don't enter our time on time, but my secretary tells me that the office manager keeps a "List." She's always making sure I don't end oup on the "List." Besides, I sometimes forget what I did yesterday. I would never remember what I did a week ago or a month ago or for how long.

Boston firm. Time supposed to be due every two days, but actually due by the end of the month.
I just use the timer function in my time entry software and close out each entry at the end of the day, but most lawyers enter time in their diaries and their secretaries enter it for them.

What's a TTT?

Isn't the odder thing that FF has a managing partner who only joined the firm in 2004? And who has a NY office but only admitted to practice in England?Talk about not knowing the culture . . .

Time here (at my D.C. Biglaw firm) must be finalized by the end of the second day following the end of the month. So all of July's time must be finalized by COB today. I can't think of any justification for requiring it sooner unless you're billing your clients more often than monthly.

Occasionally a particular client will want a preview of the bill sooner than the actual bill and then we have to report our expected gross hours on that matter to the billing partner.

My firm requires time to be in by the end of the month, but since we enter it electronically, I just do it every day. Why wait? It's a lot easier to remember if you do it as you're doing the work for the client.

I don't see why this is a big deal.

FF is a terrible, terrible place to work. This should surprise no one. The turnover for young associates there is even worse than average--2 years tops.

As 12:37 pointed out, most systems have a stopwatch function. A couple of mouse clicks and you start billing client A. A couple of mouse clicks to change to client B when she calls.

The beauty of such a system is that you can let the watch run while you're down the hall powdering your nose or reading the posts on ATL. In at 8 out at 5 with an hour for lunch and I billed 8 hours today.

When I was a SA last year, the firm (and my lousy secretary) kind of scared us summers into entering our own time, but I noticed that even the 1st and 2nd yr associates had their secretaries do it. What is more common, and which system do you think is better? I can imagine that just doing it myself every day would actually be better, but then I'm not sure.

In my day, we telegraphed our bills to the client fortnightly, you whiny punks, and we liked it!

At my big firm, it's due every three days. Secretaries help everyone (partners down to paralegals) enter their time.

2:27 -- the justification is that the firm wants to create the appearance that it is rigorous and diligent about accurate timekeeping. They say that delays in reporting time increase the likelihood that it will be inaccurate. With billing rates through the roof and time billed in 6 minute increments, the firms have to appear as strict as possible in their timekeeping policies.

The only sure things in my practice are the bi-weekly e-mails complaining that my time is delinquent and the daily e-mails telling me that my mailbox is too full. Both get ignored until there are consequences, which is when my mailbox stops letting me send e-mails and if my time is not in by the second business day of the next month, at which time my time won't get in the bills that go out.

If my firm tried any of this paternalistic bullshit about the next day, I would look for a new job. We're all professionals here, and you're only sending the bills monthly anyway.

This is a whole to do about nothing. This is a fact of life at law firms - it pays our salaries people. And FF is a great place. Associates here leave just like at every other bigtime lawfirm. And about Spendlove being admitted in NY, there is no reason to be admitted, as he manages the firm and does not handle client matters.

Time entry is the least of it - FF is terrible place to work already. Making a big deal about this new policy is like pointing out that detainees in Guantanamo don't get HBO.

I just spent the whole day putting in my time for the month......I am a summer though.

For those of you who claim FF is a bad place to work -- do any of you even work there? I do, and my hours are better than anyone I know at other big firms. And I work in one of the "busy" departments.

How much time do you think is billed weekly/monthly/yearly that is actually spent on ATL?? I bet a medium sized island could be purchased for the yearly figure.

I've worked at FF for years and I've found it to be vastly better than the firm that I worked at previously. And I am also in one of the busy departments.

I have friends who have worked at FF for years and stories of its demise have been greatly over-exaggerated.

However, they tell me the stories of how crappy life is there are pretty much dead-on.

The new policy is just a sharp stick in the eye; my guess is that associates tend to over-bill, not under-bill, when submitting hours at the end of any given month. Still, FF seems to think this will help compensate for the revenue lost upon the departure of it's 2nd biggest m&a partner.

These posts make me thrilled to never have gone to law school

Does anyone know why the timers in my billing software won't seem to let me run two timers at once? I hope they fix that in the next update.

I think "Carpe Diem" is quite an ironic name for a timer that logs your hours toiling away...pointedly *not* seizing the day

You guys are all a bunch of pussies. Try owning your own business and having to send out the bills. You're what's wrong with the American workforce.

MLB's policy - all billing for the week must be in by the following Tuesday or you get $100 deducted from your pay per violation.

MW&E policy says you have to get your time in within 3 days. You can be late three times per year. After that, asssociates are charged $25 and partners $100 for each violation. The people that enforce the policy are jerks, assessing penalties when you are out at a client, when your secretary forgets to put the time in or send the time you entered or any number of other good reasons.

I was an associate at FF. Life is certainly not crappier there than at any other NYC biglaw firm. It's really a pretty decent place to work. And hey, how many other firms have cocktail parties every Friday?

That FF memo is heavy handed. It should be a few days, not 24 hours. Anyway, the memo's tonedeaf.

But it's not the biggest deal in the world either.

Paul Hastings requires it be done by mid-month, the 15th or 20th or something like that, and then by the first biz day of the next month, but prefer that you do it daily.

If you don't do it, you get nagged by partners (if any actually notice), possibly dinged on your bonus, and they take away your staple remover so you have to use your fiinger nails to take staples out. Ouch.

Seyfarth Shaw requires weekly time (for the prior week) by Tuesday and also has end of the month deadlines.

Penalties for partners are $500 each missed deadline and for associates you get 3 strikes and then you have to pick up your paper check from the managing partner (or his designee). Talk about embarassing...I'd rather pay the $100!

Lat, I second 1:31's call for a post or even a survey on billing practices -- it's an interesting topic that's underdiscussed. I scrupulously account for bathroom breaks, coffee breaks, etc., but can't help but feeling like I'm being screwed over compared to my colleagues who stroll in at 10, waltz out at 6, and don't hesitate to bill for 8 hours.

LOL @ 6:03 from yesterday afternoon.

7:18, no, YOU are what's wrong with the American workforce. You're probably one of those assholes who squeezes out every last bit of time you can from your overworked underlings. The exploitation that occurs in this country is astonishing in its pre-Marxist, Bourgeois arrogance and disregard for human flourishing.

10:07, everyone bills bathroom breaks. You'll get used to it, I promise.

To the guy/gal who responded to Mr. 7:18's comment:

YOU GET PAID A LOT OF MONEY TO WORK HARD. IF YOU CAN'T TAKE THE HEAT, GET YOUR ASS OUT OF THE KITCHEN.

3:55, bitter, are we?

Anyone who names a law firm "Fried Frank" has nothing to relish, can't cut the mustard, and will never catch up.