In-House Counsel

Want To Work In-House? How Does $15.00 An Hour Sound?

Stop and calculate your true hourly wage before committing to an in-house role.

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She must work in-house…

It has been a week.

You know, one of those weeks where you can’t seem to catch a break at work.

Every crisis is in one of your areas of responsibility. All of your pending cases have something due within a couple of days of each other. And to top it off, there seems to be no end to the amount of inbound emails, texts, and calls, regardless of the time of day.

In the past seven days, I have averaged an 18-hour work day between meetings, calls, emails, briefings, etc. And yes, it really can be non-stop for days on end as hospitals do not keep normal business hours — in fact, they never close.

If you are a regular reader of ATL, I am going to assume you work in some sort of legal field and may hate math. In fact, I ran to the warm embrace of the legal field out of a fear of math. But as my second grade teacher Ms. Greene told me, I must always show my work, so as a quick disclaimer, my tortured attempt at math follows.

Assuming one logs consecutive 18-hour workdays over the course of the year, they will log a collective 6,552 hours of work. Further assuming an in-house counsel earns $100,000 per year, their hourly wage clocks in at a whopping $15.52 per hour.

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Yes, I can hear the collective groans and screams that my math is flawed and not even possible.

Fine. Since I am such a magnanimous boss in my hypothetical, I will give you a full four weeks off, 28 days of pure bliss where you need not think of work at all. Even still, recalculating the above math yields just slightly less than a buck an hour raise, up to $16.48 an hour.

Still screaming? Fine, to keep you happy I will double your time off yet again up to eight weeks, but your per hour rate would only increase another $1.50 an hour, now up to $17.97.

I could keep going, but again, I hate math and I think you get my drift.

So what you ask? My Biglaw colleagues are renowned for working awful hours and meeting unrealistic availability expectations.

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True, but at least their extra hours get to count for something. Each almighty billable hour they are able to log puts them one step closer to the enviable end-of-year bonus.

For me, each extra hour I log results in yet another scorned look from my wife as I respond to an email at the dinner table rather than engage in the family discussion. I will never get to count that hour in any log, nor will it come back to me in some compensation at a later date.

From the moment my feet hit the ground each morning, until my head hits the pillow in the evening, I am “on” and in service of my client. And let’s not forget the bat phone. Since our hospital truly is a 24/7/365 operation, each evening my fellow in-house counsels and I rotate who keeps a special cell phone with them that the night-shift hospital employees are instructed to call at any time in case of emergency.

Am I being a bit alarmist or extreme in my tabulation of hours worked or average hourly wage? Of course, I am trying to prove a point after all, but I contend I am not too far off the mark.

As in-house, we do enjoy the chance for a better work-life balance than our Biglaw colleagues, but as noted above, it is not without cost.

So next time you start to let your mind wander if it is really greener on the in-house side of the pasture, I encourage you to stop and calculate your true hourly wage before committing to a change. And don’t forget, there is no jaw-dropping bonus at the end of the year to make up for your efforts, and sometimes you may even get stuck with the bat phone.

Stephen R. Williams is in-house counsel with a multi-facility hospital network in the Midwest. His column focuses on a little talked about area of the in-house life, management. You can reach Stephen at stephenwilliamsjd@gmail.com.

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