Sex, Drugs, And Billable Hours!

[Ed. Note: The following piece was authored by “The Legal Tease” of Sweet Hot Justice fame. You can check out all of Legal Tease’s other musings from Sweet Hot Justice here.]

My first intervention went down pretty much exactly like the ones you see on TV. Well, except that there were no cameras. Or tears. Or therapists. And it took place in a shoebox office in a law firm instead of, say, in my living room, surrounded by friends and family. Still, the core elements were the same: I had a serious issue and it needed addressing. No, I wasn’t a junkie, or an alcoholic, or addicted to fetish porn. My issue was far more dangerous. More destructive. More worthy, apparently, of the powers that be at the firm stepping in to make sure the situation didn’t get further out of control.

The issue? My billable hours were too high.

It was a couple of years ago, when it was actually possible to have billable hours, no less ones that were too high. The day started like any other: sitting at my desk on three hours’ sleep, mourning my former life as a person who…had a life, and wading through diligence for a massive public company merger that had consumed every billable, no less waking, hour of my life since I’d started working at the firm a few months back. I heard a knock on my door and looked up to see Bess, a senior associate I’d never met, smiling at my door.

“Hey there!” she chirped. “How’s it going?”

I looked down at the heaps of SEC filings covering every inch of my desk. How does it look like it’s going?

She kept smiling. “Sooo, gotta sec?”

Sponsored

No. “Sure.”

“Great! I figured we could just go grab a coffee and talk for a bit.” Oh, Jesus Christ. What the hell is this about? I don’t have time for this.

Turns out, that was the whole point.

Having a life, after the jump.


Bess was a member of the committee at my firm responsible for monitoring associates’ hours, advancement and so-called happiness. She’d been dispatched to talk to me about my billable hours because they were apparently higher than anyone else’s in my class and it was the firm’s policy to “touch base” with anyone whose hours fell outside of the billable Bell curve–on either end. Go know. The firm thought “it was great” that I was billing so much, but wanted to check in and make sure that I wasn’t in danger of burning out, i.e. they were concerned that I was going to have a breakdown, quit, and show up in the office one day with a sawed-off shotgun, or worse, sue them.

Sponsored

After making a 20-minute Starbucks loop where Bess explained the hypothetical importance of drawing boundaries and made sure to ask if anyone had “forced” me to keep such a high pace–Of course not! That string of hundred-hour weeks was absolutely, hands-down 100% my own choice. Sleep, sex, sanity? Pass!–she sat me down and gave me the firm-sanctioned recommendation for how to handle too much stress.

“You know,” she lowered her voice, almost conspiratorially, “if you’ve been working nonstop and maybe you haven’t slept, or maybe you’re, you know, about to lose it, you can always just–“

I actually leaned forward, waiting to hear the obvious: take a nap, take a shower, take a personal day. What I didn’t expect was what came out of her mouth next.

And then “the economy” happened. Read the end of the story at Sweet Hot Justice.