Counting the 2009 Hours: An End-of-the-Year Follow-up

Over the summer, we asked you how your hours were looking for 2009. Survey respondents indicated 2009 billable hours looked to be as scarce as Zhu Zhu hamsters. Almost 20% of respondents said they would have less than 1600 hours this year.
See those results with pretty colors here.
But that survey was in August, so it was speculative. Now we’re nearing the end of the year. Is the 2009 billables outlook still bleak? Or have you been spending this fall racking up the hours?
New survey after the jump.


Since there were so many of you in the less-than-1600 category, we’ve introduced a new low end option:

See results.
Many Biglawyers are just happy to have a job this holiday season. But some have been lamenting their little bonuses. One disappointed bonus recipient wrote to us:

At this point I feel too defeated to muster much indignity about it. I’m trying to think of the bonus in terms of bonus plus salary
Just to make the math easy, suppose this bonus represents a $30,000 cut from what a second-year associate would have received two or three years ago. Bonus plus salary a couple of years ago would have totaled approximately $200,000. So the question is, did associates really work 15% less this year than they did a couple of years ago?

Well, compare your hours this year with last year. Did you work 15% less?
(For the math-impaired: Multiply this year’s hours by 1.15. E.g., if you’re a 1600-hour biller this year, and you billed 1955 or more last year, then the answer to that question is yes.)
Earlier: The Hours: How are yours looking for 2009?
The Hours Follow-Up: If you’re looking at less than 1600 in 2009, you’re not alone.

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