We've been hearing that the Los Angeles office of Sidley Austin suffers from perilously low morale. To address the situation and get feedback from associates, earlier this week the firm held what it called a "mini-retreat": three days of off-site meetings between management and associates, from Tuesday through Thursday. Fun fun.

For a "mini-retreat," the location wasn't terribly exotic. Associates were dragged across the street to the Biltmore Hotel, in batches: one day for senior associates, one day for midlevels, and one day for juniors. The meetings sucked up about half a day for each lawyer. There were no chair massages.

While some appreciated the firm's attempt to address the morale crisis, the meetings were not well-received in all quarters. The idea of mandatory, lengthy, and non-billable meetings didn't thrill associates who may have to make up the lost hours over the weekend.

The main source of discontent at Sidley - LA appears to be bonus levels. Their bonuses are described as a fraction of New York market, even for lawyers with strong reviews, and even below the market level for Los Angeles. We hear that a fair number of Sidley lawyers are interviewing around town in search of greener pastures.

We reached out to both Sidley and their outside PR firm, yesterday and today. We have not heard back from them yet, but we will let you know if we do.

Posted below is the European fee schedule of Allen & Overy. At current exchange rates -- approximately $1.55 to the Euro, and $2.00 to the British pound -- this means that partners bill out at about $1,050 an hour in Paris, and $1,190 an hour in London. Says a source: "Twelve-hundred bucks an hour for a partner in London? Ridiculous."

On the other hand, if a $1,200-an-hour partner can solve your problem in six minutes -- with a well-placed telephone call, or an absolutely brilliant judgment call -- maybe she's worth it. Perhaps you should be more worried about $600-an-hour junior associates (to say nothing of $350-per-hour paralegals).

The powers-that-be at Mayer Brown have made their decisions on bonus and salary adjustments, as announced in an email last night. And it appears that they've taken a page from the Dechert playbook, according to one associate:

"The second paragraph [of the memo] is a shock. We were never informed of financial ramifications for failing to enter our time."

It might be slightly annoying, but it's the growing trend. Expect more firms to adopt policies that tie compensation to timely time entry. Email exhortations without financial consequences don't seem to be very effective.

(And it's arguably not that big an imposition. You already slave away at the firm for ten or twelve hours a day -- so what's another five minutes at the end, to enter your time before heading home? It's just a matter of getting into the habit of doing it, instead of letting a backlog build up.)

The Mayer Brown memo, after the jump.

We received about 600 responses to last week's ATL / Lateral Link survey on leave and part-time arrangements. One reader made a very interesting suggestion in the comments:

Justin - how about you keep a list of where law firms are on parental leave? Sort of like the list Lat kept going showing who was being delinquent on raising salaries. Those lists made a big influence at some firms that were reluctant to give associate salary raises - a list like this could likewise make a world of difference in parental benefits.

I like this idea a lot, and while I won't be calling it a "list of shame," I'll be keeping a running table of maternity leave policies, starting later this week. If you'd like to make sure your firm's info is accurate, please take the survey (which will stay open for a while) or send us a tip.

In the meantime, let's focus on a slightly different data point from the survey. In addition to questions about leave, which we'll talk about later this week, we asked whether you would be interested in working fewer hours for less pay if your employer gave you the option. See the results after the jump.

How can law firm administrators get associates to enter their time on time? Here's one idea: link time entry to those beloved bonuses.

From a source at Dechert:

Attached is an email that all the attorneys at Dechert LLP received today regarding associate bonuses and potential penalties. According to the policy outlined below, an associate's bonus may be reduced by up to 10% due to the late submission of billable time over the past year. I thought this might be of some interest to your readers.

We agree. Might this become a Biglaw trend? Nagging emails about timely time entry are easily ignored. Slashing bonuses, on the other hand, tends to grab associates' attention.

In fairness to the firm, it's worth noting that the policy is not super-draconian. Most of the bonus reductions were under 5 percent, and delinquent associates have the opportunity to redeem themselves: "[E]very associate whose 2007 bonus is reduced will have the opportunity to earn the amount of bonus reduction back, if he or she remains in good standing and complies fully with our time-recording policy in 2008."

Check out the full memo, after the jump.

Yes, we did see Lisa Belkin's "Life's Work" column in yesterday's New York Times, entitled "Who's Cuddly Now? Law Firms." Truth be told, we didn't find it terribly exciting, since most of the law-firm lifestyle improvements she mentions are ones that are familiar to ATL readers. We also shared the reaction of the WSJ Law Blog, which found it sort of random for Thursday Styles: "Since when did the NYT Styles section become a legal trade?"

But since the article has zoomed to the top of the NYT Most Emailed Articles list, with which we are obsessed, we're compelled to write about it. Excerpts and discussion, after the jump.

So far, we've received exactly 1,400 responses to last week's survey on hours and bonuses. You can see how bonuses broke down for the Classes of 2005 and 2006, based on hours, in the results to yesterday's Lawyer of the Year survey.

But how did billable hours break down by city?

There's been a lot of discussion in responses to our previous surveys about whether New Yorkers really work as hard as other cities, especially given the Christmas and New Year's efforts of their California brethren.

Find out how New Yorkers really stack up, after the jump.