<p>how closely to people really keep track of their billable hours. i mean i find it hard to believe that practicing lawyers keep track of every minute of their day. </p>
<p>Like if they finish something in 45 minutes, wouldnt they just write down 1 hour. and i imagine a lot of times that lawyers work on several things at once/during the day, and then kind of ballpark their billable hours. this way billing 2000 hours can mean only working for 1600 hours. </p>
<p>or am i wrong and lawyers actually keep track of billable hours to the minute. does anyone with experience know?</p>
<p>Lawyers are supposed to keep track of their hours down to the tenth of an hour. Many law firms require that their attorneys submit their journal entries daily, if not weekly. Lawyers keep a journal on their desks in which they note at what time they start working a matter and at what time they stop. There may be multiple entries for a given matter in a given day. Trips to the bathroom, coffee runs, lunch and dinner (unless business is discussed with clients at lunch or dinner) are not counted. Business travel does count as billable hours, but you may not double bill that time (i.e. travel for one client and do work on your computer during the plane ride for another). </p>
<p>I cannot guarantee that every lawyer follows the rules, but most do and many firms strictly monitor this.</p>
<p>When I was an associate at a large firm many years ago, one of the associates billed 2400 hours, and that associate was held up as the model. That was considered a lot of hours back then - now - not as unusual. That associate had joked with me that when he went to an administrative hearing where several cases would be addressed, he billed the entire time to each file. Sitting for 2 hours with 6 files in his briefcase gave him 12 hours. In the 80s, several attorneys at prominent firms got in trouble for billing fraud. The firms realized that basing bonuses entirely on hours was causing a lot of cheating. They changed the system for a number of years, but as with many things, history repeats, and we are back to hours based bonuses again.</p>
<p>The firms I worked for did mostly plaintiff-side work, on a contingency basis, where we didn't have to bill by the hour. When I did bill by the hour, I used to bill based on how much time it would have taken an idealized version of myself (one with a longer attention span) to perform a given task.</p>
<p>It's the freedom from the tyranny of the billable hour that makes in-house work so attractive for a lot of us, frankly. I've always thought of J. Alfred Prufrock as a guy who spent his days working for a big law firm: "I have measured out my life in coffee spoons..."</p>
<p>At the firm I worked at last summer (and most other firms) all attorneys have a computer program with timers...you have a different timer for each matter you're working on, and you click it when you start working on something and click again when you switch to something else. I preferred using pen and paper, but yes, I billed accurately (we were told it was ok to round, so if I worked 16 minutes I could bill 0.3 hours, but I certainly didn't sit there and think "ok I've worked 16 minutes, time to goof off for two minutes.") </p>
<p>tracking and billing my time was one of my least favorite things about the summer. I really liked the people and the work, but the billable hour stinks. It's one of the reasons I'm not joining a firm next year.</p>
<p>Another note--especially for new lawyers, the amount of time you bill is often not the amount of time the client pays for...the partners will discount some of the time under the assumption that new lawyers are inefficient. Again, not an excuse to pad hours, just a fact of business practice.</p>
<p>There is also often a non-billable hour requirement, involving development, training and sometimes, administrative duties. Many firms also require pro bono work.</p>
<p>Billing is a continuing struggle. If you charge two hours for something that a partner thinks should have taken one hour, you will be viewed as inefficient whether or not the client can be billed for two hours. Associates love assignments that take big chunks of time, like attending a one-day deposition.</p>
<p>As a client, I find that I frequently have to complain about associates who bill an hour for "reviewing file," for reading a two page letter, or for a 10 min phone call (yes, we keep track of our calls with our lawyers and know when someone is inaccurately billing us). After complaints, an associate is removed from a project or the firm is forced to cut bills to clients...thereby increasing its own overhead cost for that associate.</p>
<p>It was a long time ago, but I recall working long Sunday afternoons/evenings as a litigation associate on projects that I knew were taking me too long. I did them on my own time so that the firm and client wouldn't have to address my learning curve. A lot of nonbillable time also needs to be spent reading professional journals, cases, and other materials to keep up with the changes in the law. Sigh. Glad I'm in-house now, and don't have to deal with hourly accountability.</p>
<p>I work for a corporation. In-house legal work can include contract reviews and negotiation, litigation management (or handling some dispute resolution procedures ourselves, such as mediation or even arbitration), SEC/corporate tasks, patent work, writing policies and procedures, corporate communications, legislative advice, human resource support, and a full gamut of legal services. The hours of an in-house lawyer can be just as long as law firm hours, which is a common misconception.</p>
<p>Two benefits of being in-house are that we don't have the continuing law firm pressure to find and keep clients ("rain-maker" pressure), and we don't have to be billable and do incremental timesheets. Our employee benefits may also be better than some law firm benefits, particularly mid-to small law firm benefits.</p>
<p>Negatives are that in-house salaries are typically lower with less potential for upside or the big bonuses associated with law firm practice. Another negative, depending on your goals and perspective, is that corporate lawyers are not their own bosses to the extent that partners in law firms are bosses. </p>
<p>The type of in-house work that you perform can be a plus or a negative, depending on your professional goals. If you want to be a litigator, being in-house would obviously be a negative. If you want to do contracts work, being in-house would be a positive.</p>
<p>There are a lot of software programs that allow lawyers in essence to run stop watches for each client. If they are working on a file for one client and a second client calls on the phone, the lawyer can stop the clock for the first client and start it for the second. This can all be done from a computer keyboard.</p>
<p>In the movie The Firm, Gene Hackman explains billing to newbie Tom Cruise and tells him something like, "Even when you're sitting at a red light thinking about a client, that's billable time." Gotta wonder how much of that goes on.</p>
<p>It probably happens less often than you might think. Many lawyers don't keep great track of time (especially when they're busy) and don't enter their hours on a daily basis. When they go back at the end of the week and try to remember what they did, they tend to forget things that didn't take a lot of time. Are you going to remember the five minutes you spent one morning reviewing a form, or the 10-minute phone call you had in the middle of a hectic afternoon? Probably not.</p>