Biglaw

Is Billing All Those Hours Really Worth It?

He who dies with the most toys still dies.

By  
on

If there’s any example of how excessive hours wreck lives, Exhibit 1 is Elon Musk’s interview in the New York Times, in which he lamented the state of his life due to the number of hours he’s spending at Tesla.

Work until you drop is the mantra of our job culture. This is not a good thing, at least I don’t think so, and I am not alone in that thinking.

As Biglaw firms crank up the billable hour requirements to compensate for the salaries and bonuses now being paid to associates, how many more hours can any one human being (e.g. not a robot) bill? There has to be a limit, and how close are we to that limit? Where is the breaking point? Is there a magic number beyond which one cannot stretch? Is this a form of indentured servitude in the service of paying off those student loans?

Should there be an award (other than whatever monetary awards accrue) for billing the most hours in a year? Should there be something akin to an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony, and/or a Grammy for most hours billed? (Remember that I live in Tinseltown, award central and ground zero for patting oneself on the back, a major physical activity here.) Should there be an Olympics for lawyer billings? Gold for X hours, silver for Y hours, bronze for Z hours. Is billing all those hours something to be praised or pitied? Do these hours deserve a medal? You tell me.

Of course, anyone who can’t match those hours feels pretty crummy right now, suffering billing hours envy. And, since we regularly beat ourselves up for what we did do, didn’t do, should have done, should never have done, it’s easy to think that we don’t measure up to that standard and that we should all strive to attain that goal. Not.

In that New York Times interview, Musk talked about working 120 hours per week. He said that he hadn’t taken more than a week off since 2001 (not a typo). “There were times when I didn’t leave the factory for three or four days — days when I didn’t go outside,” he said. “This has really come at the expense of seeing my kids. And seeing friends.” No surprise there.

Let’s do the math here. A week has 168 hours, so subtracting the 120 hours from the 168 leaves only 48 hours a week for every other activity and function that humans have. (I’m not going into detail here between what has to be done and what one wants to do.) So, for those lawyers who routinely bill 3000 hours or more a year (approximately 60 hours a week), either by fiat or desire, there is not a lot of time left for everything else, family, friends, health, and whatever else needs to be done in a normal week. Of course, it all depends on how you define a normal work week. If you work 5 days a week, it’s 12 billable hours a day. If you work more than 5 days a week, does the billable hours requirement become any more palatable? At what cost? Read Harry Chapin’s lyrics to his 1974 song, Cat’s in the Cradle. We apparently didn’t get the message.

Sponsored

Don’t forget about sleep and not the sleeping at your desk variety. Pulling all-nighters gets old, the older you get. Couple a lack of sleep with the stress that the profession generates on a daily basis and it’s no wonder that burnout and substance abuse problems plague us.

What’s the goal here? Is it to bill the most hours humanly and even inhumanly possible in the desire to get the most money? Does billing all those hours truly serve the needs of the client? Perhaps clients should weigh in on whether all those hours reflected in the billings are value added. All those hours billing clients are hours not spent elsewhere.

As Mark Herrmann pointed out in one of his ATL posts, numbers are seductive, and the higher the numbers, the more seductive. But Mark notes that numbers don’t have anything to do with quality.

Not everyone can bill 3000 or more hours a year or wants to approach anything close to that. Being a workaholic is, I think, no longer a badge of honor in our profession, no longer something to brag about, especially for millennial lawyers. It’s not a matter of not having a work ethic, as some dinosaurs claim. It’s having a different work ethic, one that tries to strike a balance between work and the rest of one’s life. Dinosaurs see how the profession has changed from when we entered it, and yet it’s often hard to wrap dinosaur heads around those changes and the differences in attitudes toward practice.

Technology has made a lot of the drudge work of lawyering (and I’ll get no argument that there is indeed a lot of drudgery, mind-numbing work) so that lawyers are released from that to spend time in other ways. That’s why I think the billable hour, except in big high stakes cases, will eventually go the way of the….dinosaur.

Sponsored

I’m exhausted just reading about those lawyers who summit the Mt. Everest of billable hours. I’m not sure I’m even impressed with the Iron Man triathlon approach to hours.

From a t-shirt some years ago: “He who dies with the most toys still dies.” Unless you’re going to be buried in that awesome car, on your yacht that never leaves the marina because you’re too busy or in that McMansion that you only sleep in, you are still going to go out the same way you came in—with nothing.

Topics

,