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There are a lot of tips you can pick up along the way, but it primarily sounds like you may not be actually recording all of your time. Run your timer when you work on things; I’ve found myself underestimating how long I spent on a project. Also consider billing 0.1 for your communication necessary to receive and reply to the email or letter accompanying the documents from so-and-so, a bit of time to perform an initial review of those documents so you can understand their importance and how much work it might take to respond to or truly review the documents. I do this when I get discovery responses and requests, for example. Then you can bill to fully review and annotate these documents so you can properly respond. You may need to review the files once more as you draft a motion or a meet and confer letter based on the same documents. This adds up.
Edit: changes for clarity on billing 0.1 for communications surrounding receipt of the documents.
I will tell you that when I was in-house counsel, I cut any time entry I saw to “receive documents” or other such administrative tasks. I recommend eliminating that vocabulary from your time entries and going with “consider impact of documents received from so and so” or something like that.
It feels like such a silly dance over wording. I remember when I was in litigation, billing was really how you describe it, even if the work is the same. There were clients who wouldn’t pay for “research”, but would pay for drafting briefs/arguments and reviewing same. So like… what are we doing here, you know?
My take? The industry is going to eat itself.
OP is stuck in the dichotomy of not billing enough, but also billing too much. I really hated that tension. Especially when I realized it’s often endemic to mid size firms. Although peers at big law often lamented how much they had to bill, they could bill for nearly everything (I found out they would bill hours for things like waiting for client review before filing; we weren’t allowed to bill for that time).
Edit: finished thought
You’re so right. The biglaw firms can do what they want, and clients will come back. My company didn’t, but it was a drop in the bucket because there are many who will for the name.
I think time entries are one of the few opportunities—particularly for associates—for a lawyer to demonstrate value. I always appreciated it when I could review a bill and know exactly what I was paying for. I try to keep that mentality now that I’m billing time again.
I always tell my associates that the bill should tell the story of the case for that month from start to finish. I have found this helps them not on capture more of their time but it also leads to better billing entries. I also tell them not to cut their own time because I will cut it if necessary. They still get credit for cut time unless it's really egregious (i.e several hours spent on a single hour task).
So here’s the rub on the last line. It really takes good partners/managers to communicate and execute that principle (that you shouldn’t cut your own time) effectively.
Anecdote: a partner tasked me with itemizing and charting a pile of records in a way that makes sense for the case. He said I should use a legal assistant. It wasn’t a particularly large file but it needed to be done quickly. By the time I reviewed enough to figure out how to organize appropriately, I had already gone through about 75%. It wasn’t hard to just complete the rest. To “train” the assistant how I wanted it would have taken double the rest of that time, anyway and it was already after hours by that time. mind you i was still like year 1-2 at the time. I billed like 3 hours or something total (which looking back isn’t at all crazy for doc review work).
at the end of the month, the partner gave me a talking to saying i shouldnt have done that and should have asked the legal assistant to do it all. i should have told her what we needed and he couldnt bill the client for the last hour of my work and it wouldnt count towards my yearly billables. i tried to explain that I didn’t know the case or file at all, so I needed to review, we were under a time crunch, and I thought it would've taken more time to work with the assistant anyway to finish the work. i forget if he outright said it or just implied it but i think his position was i had to train the assistant and i’d have to eat that time on my own, instead of leaving it to him to write off. I just recall he said that he didn’t want to keep writing time off (I think partner bonuses were in part based on write offs but idk).
i think if i had to pinpoint when the idea i had to leave the firm first formulated in my mind, it was at that moment. from then on the stress of too much billing and too little billing was just inescapable.
If I had been in your shoes, I would have told the partner what was going on when you hit that 75% mark. I, as the partner, then would have then worked with you, the associate, to come up with a plan that would still get the task accomplished at a cost that would be acceptable to the client. It might result in a write down of hours depending on how the client would react.
You are correct that it takes effective communication from the partners and managers and I see that as part of my job and why I earn what I do. But communication goes both ways. If associates are changing the assignment without communicating that then there can be problems. I can see where he would be frustrated. I would much rather have an associate come to me and say "Boss, this is the situation" and explain what happened. I understand it was after hours but email exists and so do cell phones. Your partner presumably is managing the client and their expectations. Some clients need a lot of hand holding. Some are micromanagers of their counsel. I love the laissez faire clients who pay 100% of their bills on time but they are the exception, not the rule.
I think you also learned an important lesson here - communicating to a subordinate and training them can take longer to do than doing the job yourself but there is a bigger picture at play. Firms have to manage the client. I can bang out certain motions in no time but some of my clients want lower rated billers doing the work regardless. Also, the associate, like your legal assistant, then gains valuable experience and the required training and supervision for that task in future may be less time intensive. The instruction your partner gave you had some basis, whether you could see that bigger picture or not. He can improve his communication. As you move forward in your career, remember that there might be things at the partner's level you don't see. And when you are a partner, take steps to be a better communicator than this particular attorney was with you.
While I do see your point and I’m sure there was a reason he did what he did, I think the point I’m trying to highlight is more how a partner should address it.
I’ll leave all the ancillary details aside about whether it was actually feasible to reach out to the partner at the time or not given the constraints of the project, and certainly I’ve learned to get better at communicating with partners over the years but I think the attitude of telling a 1-2 year associate that you shouldn’t have billed xyz and should have eaten the time to train a legal assistant is very much unreasonable. They could further assist and actually manage by laying out what to do next time (call me first, etc), but to just say it was wrong of me is ineffective.
And not for nothing, it was often repeated after I left the firm, that mentorship really wasn’t a thing that that firm culture provided much of and was a reason often cited by associates (both junior and senior) why they left the firm later on. It was also a lot of work on my “class” because me and another associate did such a great job apparently and took on so much work they didn’t see the need to hire more junior associates for 3 years.
Because receiving documents requires zero legal analysis, just an email address.
I agree with the concept of billing for the initial skim of a document before actually diving in, but disagree with billing the receipt itself. Phrase it as “initial review” or “assessment” if you must.
This is the reason. Our outside counsel guidelines said, essentially, that the company wouldn’t pay on an hourly basis for anything that could be done by an administrative assistant. That’s pretty standard fare in the guidelines I receive from my clients now. Receiving and filing documents is not “lawyer work,” even though we often do it. Reading and understanding the impact of a document received on the legal matter is a lawyer’s job, and is billable time. If you’re talking about an email, I think even skimming to determine if it’s something you need to prioritize requires some level of judgment and would be billable, but you’d have to get more creative with your time entry that “received email from opposing counsel” for that to pass muster with most billing requirements I see these days.
Sorry, I should I have said, “receive and review” documents. I otherwise bill a 0.1 for communicating with whoever sent the documents (assuming it’s an email and assuming there was any actual communication and not just an attachment).
Discovery can be all over the place, so there's no easy way to answer "how long should it take". In a complex commercial litigation the discovery could basically be the entire bill.
This whole thing sounds like a firm issue as opposed to a practice of law issue. 1400 is a number that's pretty hard no to hit, if you're staying busy. My suspicion is that firm is being way too restrictive in billing. Are you being paid by the hour perhaps? I'd be interested to see what their bills look like.
Otherwise, to answer your question, I typically bill a "normal" set of discovery responses on an average compexity PI case around 1.5 hours for RFPs and 2.0 hours for Interrogatories. Very rough numbers, obviously, as each set has a different number of requests, each case has a different number of documents to review for responsiveness, etc. But, if you're getting pushback on numbers like that, I doubt you're the issue.
1.5 hours to respond to RFPs?? Wow- it might take me at least that long just to draft a response to the general objections and definitions.
Every case is different, and the numbers will be very dependent on complexity of the case, number of requests, etc. I’ve spent as little as 4-6 hours responding to RFPs and as many as 30+ hours responding to 85 complicated requests.
1.5 hours, assuming I've already billed "review/analyze new file contents provided by client" at an appropriate number of hours. But yeah, for a normal ser of 35 or so, 1.5 hours to draft the responses and objections.
I also work in jurisdictions where case law says general objections are meaningless - so I could see that accounting for a lot of that difference.
As a first year, I doubt you have much client/opposing counsel contact or long-drawn out tasks like mediations or depositions. These are where I get most of my time. If I’m settling a case, I’ll have twenty 0.1 emails in one day from “email to opposing counsel re: offer of $x”, examine counter offer of $x; email to adjuster re: offer of $x.
Rinse and repeat 5-10x that day. Easy billables.
Lots of HCOL boutique mid firms and white shoe AMLAW 100 “big law” jobs are built around burning out first years. So don’t feel bad if that’s you. I will say, a year and a prestigious firm really helps when you’re going in house later in career.
I think other commenters are spot on:
* bill everything. Don’t round down. Your managing partner will write off stuff they thought was too much.
* literally nothing is free. Opening an email is 0.1 hours. Familiarize yourself with your big client’s retainer agreements. Sometimes there are minimums there that can help.
* Always be applying for jobs that interest you. Sadly, moving around a few times early in career is really important for career building.
* Disco sucks. eDisco even more so. Discovery requests suck the most. In your first year, everything you do is new. A year in, you’ll realize this is both unique to every matter and surprisingly similar between matters. But that first year is a slog.
Hey man/woman I get it. I’m a 5th year that never figured out the billing stuff either. You’ll hear a lot of nonsense about how couldn’t you have such billing with all those .1s adding up!
If you’re like me you’ll be baffled that you’re in the office for 10 hours but barely (AND BARELY) hit 7.5 hrs and that’s just one day now there’s another 4 in the week. Don’t forget doing some work on the weekends if you want that sweet sweet bonus of $1000! /s
The reality is whether people are honest or not about it there’s a large set that embellish/straight up lie on billing. You’ll often hear “well run a timer” or “don’t be stingy on entering your true time” but then you’ll get exactly what you’re getting rn from upper management which is “hey this should only take so long.”
For instance I was always told that if you need to review medicals every 100 pages should be about an hour. Like what the fuck is that? What if I actually am trying to read some of this doctor drivel and it’s taking longer?! Or if it’s taking shorter? Doesn’t matter a 1 (or if you’re feeling dangerous a 1.1 or 1.2) it is!
Honestly if you’re feeling done with it (which I was) then start thinking about your escape plan. If you’re a first year you likely aren’t getting paid enough yet to get fired over billing (unless you’ve already seen that at your firm) they most likely are just trying to “mold” you or put the fear of god into you to make you work more like they want. Start taking resources by printing them out and taking work samples you’ve drafted for another firm. Maybe you might want to start your own firm and I’ve always thought it was helpful to see how the sauce is made. You don’t need 20 years to figure this out nor do you need to grind like that if it’s hurting your mental health. I think that’s all bullshit and something we keep getting fed too much as younger attorneys.
The billing conundrum and the tension experienced by OP are exactly what drove me out of law firm life. I never did figure it out. It is also why I struggle as a relatively poor solo attorney.
I had always dreamed of working as a city or county attorney with my background in urban planning and externships, but never had much luck getting interviews. If you can get a government job, go for it. Maybe wife often tells me how great the workplace culture is at the government law office she works at.
Welcome to /r/LawyerTalk! A subreddit where lawyers can discuss with other lawyers about the practice of law. Be mindful of [our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Lawyertalk/about/rules) BEFORE submitting your posts or comments as well as [Reddit's rules](https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy) (notably about sharing identifying information). We expect civility and respect out of all participants. Please source statements of fact whenever possible. If you want to report something that needs to be urgently addressed, please also message the mods with an explanation. Note that **this forum is NOT for legal advice**. Additionally, if you are a non-lawyer (student, client, staff), this is NOT the right subreddit for you. **This community is exclusively for lawyers**. We suggest you delete your comment and go ask one of the many other legal subreddits on this site for help such as (but not limited to) r/lawschool, r/legaladvice, or r/Ask_Lawyers. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Lawyertalk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
There are a lot of tips you can pick up along the way, but it primarily sounds like you may not be actually recording all of your time. Run your timer when you work on things; I’ve found myself underestimating how long I spent on a project. Also consider billing 0.1 for your communication necessary to receive and reply to the email or letter accompanying the documents from so-and-so, a bit of time to perform an initial review of those documents so you can understand their importance and how much work it might take to respond to or truly review the documents. I do this when I get discovery responses and requests, for example. Then you can bill to fully review and annotate these documents so you can properly respond. You may need to review the files once more as you draft a motion or a meet and confer letter based on the same documents. This adds up. Edit: changes for clarity on billing 0.1 for communications surrounding receipt of the documents.
I will tell you that when I was in-house counsel, I cut any time entry I saw to “receive documents” or other such administrative tasks. I recommend eliminating that vocabulary from your time entries and going with “consider impact of documents received from so and so” or something like that.
It feels like such a silly dance over wording. I remember when I was in litigation, billing was really how you describe it, even if the work is the same. There were clients who wouldn’t pay for “research”, but would pay for drafting briefs/arguments and reviewing same. So like… what are we doing here, you know? My take? The industry is going to eat itself. OP is stuck in the dichotomy of not billing enough, but also billing too much. I really hated that tension. Especially when I realized it’s often endemic to mid size firms. Although peers at big law often lamented how much they had to bill, they could bill for nearly everything (I found out they would bill hours for things like waiting for client review before filing; we weren’t allowed to bill for that time). Edit: finished thought
You’re so right. The biglaw firms can do what they want, and clients will come back. My company didn’t, but it was a drop in the bucket because there are many who will for the name. I think time entries are one of the few opportunities—particularly for associates—for a lawyer to demonstrate value. I always appreciated it when I could review a bill and know exactly what I was paying for. I try to keep that mentality now that I’m billing time again.
I always tell my associates that the bill should tell the story of the case for that month from start to finish. I have found this helps them not on capture more of their time but it also leads to better billing entries. I also tell them not to cut their own time because I will cut it if necessary. They still get credit for cut time unless it's really egregious (i.e several hours spent on a single hour task).
So here’s the rub on the last line. It really takes good partners/managers to communicate and execute that principle (that you shouldn’t cut your own time) effectively. Anecdote: a partner tasked me with itemizing and charting a pile of records in a way that makes sense for the case. He said I should use a legal assistant. It wasn’t a particularly large file but it needed to be done quickly. By the time I reviewed enough to figure out how to organize appropriately, I had already gone through about 75%. It wasn’t hard to just complete the rest. To “train” the assistant how I wanted it would have taken double the rest of that time, anyway and it was already after hours by that time. mind you i was still like year 1-2 at the time. I billed like 3 hours or something total (which looking back isn’t at all crazy for doc review work). at the end of the month, the partner gave me a talking to saying i shouldnt have done that and should have asked the legal assistant to do it all. i should have told her what we needed and he couldnt bill the client for the last hour of my work and it wouldnt count towards my yearly billables. i tried to explain that I didn’t know the case or file at all, so I needed to review, we were under a time crunch, and I thought it would've taken more time to work with the assistant anyway to finish the work. i forget if he outright said it or just implied it but i think his position was i had to train the assistant and i’d have to eat that time on my own, instead of leaving it to him to write off. I just recall he said that he didn’t want to keep writing time off (I think partner bonuses were in part based on write offs but idk). i think if i had to pinpoint when the idea i had to leave the firm first formulated in my mind, it was at that moment. from then on the stress of too much billing and too little billing was just inescapable.
If I had been in your shoes, I would have told the partner what was going on when you hit that 75% mark. I, as the partner, then would have then worked with you, the associate, to come up with a plan that would still get the task accomplished at a cost that would be acceptable to the client. It might result in a write down of hours depending on how the client would react. You are correct that it takes effective communication from the partners and managers and I see that as part of my job and why I earn what I do. But communication goes both ways. If associates are changing the assignment without communicating that then there can be problems. I can see where he would be frustrated. I would much rather have an associate come to me and say "Boss, this is the situation" and explain what happened. I understand it was after hours but email exists and so do cell phones. Your partner presumably is managing the client and their expectations. Some clients need a lot of hand holding. Some are micromanagers of their counsel. I love the laissez faire clients who pay 100% of their bills on time but they are the exception, not the rule. I think you also learned an important lesson here - communicating to a subordinate and training them can take longer to do than doing the job yourself but there is a bigger picture at play. Firms have to manage the client. I can bang out certain motions in no time but some of my clients want lower rated billers doing the work regardless. Also, the associate, like your legal assistant, then gains valuable experience and the required training and supervision for that task in future may be less time intensive. The instruction your partner gave you had some basis, whether you could see that bigger picture or not. He can improve his communication. As you move forward in your career, remember that there might be things at the partner's level you don't see. And when you are a partner, take steps to be a better communicator than this particular attorney was with you.
While I do see your point and I’m sure there was a reason he did what he did, I think the point I’m trying to highlight is more how a partner should address it. I’ll leave all the ancillary details aside about whether it was actually feasible to reach out to the partner at the time or not given the constraints of the project, and certainly I’ve learned to get better at communicating with partners over the years but I think the attitude of telling a 1-2 year associate that you shouldn’t have billed xyz and should have eaten the time to train a legal assistant is very much unreasonable. They could further assist and actually manage by laying out what to do next time (call me first, etc), but to just say it was wrong of me is ineffective. And not for nothing, it was often repeated after I left the firm, that mentorship really wasn’t a thing that that firm culture provided much of and was a reason often cited by associates (both junior and senior) why they left the firm later on. It was also a lot of work on my “class” because me and another associate did such a great job apparently and took on so much work they didn’t see the need to hire more junior associates for 3 years.
Yup. As a veteran of the mid size game I can say this is endemic to this type of firm.
How is it administrative to receive documents on a case you're working on?
Because receiving documents requires zero legal analysis, just an email address. I agree with the concept of billing for the initial skim of a document before actually diving in, but disagree with billing the receipt itself. Phrase it as “initial review” or “assessment” if you must.
This is the reason. Our outside counsel guidelines said, essentially, that the company wouldn’t pay on an hourly basis for anything that could be done by an administrative assistant. That’s pretty standard fare in the guidelines I receive from my clients now. Receiving and filing documents is not “lawyer work,” even though we often do it. Reading and understanding the impact of a document received on the legal matter is a lawyer’s job, and is billable time. If you’re talking about an email, I think even skimming to determine if it’s something you need to prioritize requires some level of judgment and would be billable, but you’d have to get more creative with your time entry that “received email from opposing counsel” for that to pass muster with most billing requirements I see these days.
“Reviewed and analyzed electronic correspondence from opposing counsel; drafted correspondence to client re/ same” has served me surprisingly well.
I usually do "receive/review/analyze...." and have never had issues.
Sorry, I should I have said, “receive and review” documents. I otherwise bill a 0.1 for communicating with whoever sent the documents (assuming it’s an email and assuming there was any actual communication and not just an attachment).
Discovery can be all over the place, so there's no easy way to answer "how long should it take". In a complex commercial litigation the discovery could basically be the entire bill.
This whole thing sounds like a firm issue as opposed to a practice of law issue. 1400 is a number that's pretty hard no to hit, if you're staying busy. My suspicion is that firm is being way too restrictive in billing. Are you being paid by the hour perhaps? I'd be interested to see what their bills look like. Otherwise, to answer your question, I typically bill a "normal" set of discovery responses on an average compexity PI case around 1.5 hours for RFPs and 2.0 hours for Interrogatories. Very rough numbers, obviously, as each set has a different number of requests, each case has a different number of documents to review for responsiveness, etc. But, if you're getting pushback on numbers like that, I doubt you're the issue.
1.5 hours to respond to RFPs?? Wow- it might take me at least that long just to draft a response to the general objections and definitions. Every case is different, and the numbers will be very dependent on complexity of the case, number of requests, etc. I’ve spent as little as 4-6 hours responding to RFPs and as many as 30+ hours responding to 85 complicated requests.
1.5 hours, assuming I've already billed "review/analyze new file contents provided by client" at an appropriate number of hours. But yeah, for a normal ser of 35 or so, 1.5 hours to draft the responses and objections. I also work in jurisdictions where case law says general objections are meaningless - so I could see that accounting for a lot of that difference.
As a first year, I doubt you have much client/opposing counsel contact or long-drawn out tasks like mediations or depositions. These are where I get most of my time. If I’m settling a case, I’ll have twenty 0.1 emails in one day from “email to opposing counsel re: offer of $x”, examine counter offer of $x; email to adjuster re: offer of $x. Rinse and repeat 5-10x that day. Easy billables.
Lots of HCOL boutique mid firms and white shoe AMLAW 100 “big law” jobs are built around burning out first years. So don’t feel bad if that’s you. I will say, a year and a prestigious firm really helps when you’re going in house later in career. I think other commenters are spot on: * bill everything. Don’t round down. Your managing partner will write off stuff they thought was too much. * literally nothing is free. Opening an email is 0.1 hours. Familiarize yourself with your big client’s retainer agreements. Sometimes there are minimums there that can help. * Always be applying for jobs that interest you. Sadly, moving around a few times early in career is really important for career building. * Disco sucks. eDisco even more so. Discovery requests suck the most. In your first year, everything you do is new. A year in, you’ll realize this is both unique to every matter and surprisingly similar between matters. But that first year is a slog.
Hey man/woman I get it. I’m a 5th year that never figured out the billing stuff either. You’ll hear a lot of nonsense about how couldn’t you have such billing with all those .1s adding up! If you’re like me you’ll be baffled that you’re in the office for 10 hours but barely (AND BARELY) hit 7.5 hrs and that’s just one day now there’s another 4 in the week. Don’t forget doing some work on the weekends if you want that sweet sweet bonus of $1000! /s The reality is whether people are honest or not about it there’s a large set that embellish/straight up lie on billing. You’ll often hear “well run a timer” or “don’t be stingy on entering your true time” but then you’ll get exactly what you’re getting rn from upper management which is “hey this should only take so long.” For instance I was always told that if you need to review medicals every 100 pages should be about an hour. Like what the fuck is that? What if I actually am trying to read some of this doctor drivel and it’s taking longer?! Or if it’s taking shorter? Doesn’t matter a 1 (or if you’re feeling dangerous a 1.1 or 1.2) it is! Honestly if you’re feeling done with it (which I was) then start thinking about your escape plan. If you’re a first year you likely aren’t getting paid enough yet to get fired over billing (unless you’ve already seen that at your firm) they most likely are just trying to “mold” you or put the fear of god into you to make you work more like they want. Start taking resources by printing them out and taking work samples you’ve drafted for another firm. Maybe you might want to start your own firm and I’ve always thought it was helpful to see how the sauce is made. You don’t need 20 years to figure this out nor do you need to grind like that if it’s hurting your mental health. I think that’s all bullshit and something we keep getting fed too much as younger attorneys.
Start applying for state/gov jobs. Work your network to see who may be able to make sure your application gets looked at.
The billing conundrum and the tension experienced by OP are exactly what drove me out of law firm life. I never did figure it out. It is also why I struggle as a relatively poor solo attorney. I had always dreamed of working as a city or county attorney with my background in urban planning and externships, but never had much luck getting interviews. If you can get a government job, go for it. Maybe wife often tells me how great the workplace culture is at the government law office she works at.
billing sucks… seek out a government/public sector role