Associate Attorneys: You’re Thinking About Billable Hours All Wrong
(And That’s Why They Stress You Out)
Are you an associate attorney putting in long hours but still falling short on your billables? The way you approach billable hours might be causing you to undervalue and undercount your own time. As an attorney-turned-ADHD coach, I’ve worked with many associates who struggle with the same billable hour stress I experienced.
Does this sound familiar?
You’re behind on hours, and the pressure to catch up leads you to want to dive straight into obviously billable tasks without taking any time to plan or prioritize. Without a plan or strategy for choosing what to tackle first, you may bounce between projects, making it hard to keep track of how long you’re working on any particular matter, and increasing the amount of time lost to transitioning between different tasks.
Or you may get paralyzed not knowing how to choose, and find yourself avoiding your work altogether, while unable to give yourself permission to plan because that’s not “real work” (and certainly not billable), and possibly because you’ve never been shown how to plan in a way that’s actually effective for you. When you do choose a task, especially if it’s big, complex, something you haven’t done before, or something you feel badly about not having worked on sooner, you find it hard to even know where to start, leading to more bouncing around and/or avoidance.
You don’t want to bill clients for things that don’t feel worthy of the high rates your firm is charging for your time, so you don’t count any of the time you spend paralyzed. In fact, there’s a lot of administrative stuff that you spend time on that you don’t bill because it doesn’t feel right to you. You find yourself spending all your time doing work, stressing about work, or avoiding work (often while berating yourself for not knowing how to start), at the expense of your your well-being and personal life.
If this resonates with you, then you are probably seeing the billable hour as a judgment of the actual value of your time, versus the quantity of it. And this makes sense! So much about how law firms operate is about maintaining the image of the firm and profession in the eyes of the clients, and not about the reality of what it is to do the work and run the business, and when it comes to billable hours, the image and the reality are in tension.
From an image standpoint, the cost has to be justified to the client who receives the bill, so associates have to write time entries that make the client believe that every tenth of an hour spent on their matter was profound in order to be worth its steep cost, and may internalize that this should, in fact, also be the truth.
Many law firms prize the number of hours billed as the most important metric of performance, reinforcing the associates’ belief that the only thing that really “counts” as billable is time spent doing their best possible hands-on work on a deliverable work product. This can lead to either not billing planning and administrative time spent on cases, or NOT DOING necessary planning and admin because of the pressure to get billables up.
But here’s the reality behind the image:
Law firms are businesses, and businesses have expenses that need to be paid for. These include your salary and benefits, the salary and benefits of admin staff, IT departments, legal assistants and HR, computers, servers, software, the overhead of maintaining an office space that impresses clients, etc.
Who pays for those things? The clients, of course.
The way law firms pass that cost on to clients is through the rates charged for billable hours, so the clients who are taking up more of your time are paying not only for that time but for a proportional share of the expenses that keep the firm going. If you look at it this way, the clients are paying for the quantity of your time, not necessarily the quality of every minute. Every matter is going to require you to do some tasks that require more thought and effort than others, and not every minute billed has to be an equal amount of effort for you in order to be part of the value provided to the client.
Even if you aren’t ready to believe me on that, remember that when you are doing something on a client matter that doesn’t feel like “real work,” there is an opportunity cost of you NOT working on a different client’s matter in order to focus on the matter at hand. If you aren’t billing for time spent on a matter because you don’t think what you did in that time was of the utmost possible value, the person paying that price is you, out of your own time and energy for your own life.
So what can you do to make it easier to survive in this system?
If you share this struggle, I’m NOT suggesting that you stay paralyzed and bill your clients for time you spend avoiding your overwhelm.
I AM encouraging you to:
Value your own time highly and bill for all the little things you do for clients you feel like you shouldn’t bill for. It’s not possible to reach typical billable hours requirements without burning out if you are only billing for time that your brain is engaged in its most difficult peak performance, and you are a more valuable member of the team when you are not burned out. Remember that you are creative and talented and capable of figuring out how to word it in your billing narratives or fold it into time entries for tasks you are more comfortable billing for, where it makes sense, so that clients will recognize the value as well.
Recognize that PLANNING IS WORK, and it’s a CRUCIAL part of the work. Planning can help you get more done, more efficiently, with less stress. Plus, it requires your skills and experience – the main thing that clients KNOW they are paying for. So give yourself permission to do it, and to bill clients for the time spent on it.
“PLANNING IS WORK, and it’s a CRUCIAL part of the work. Give yourself permission to do it, and to bill clients for the time spent on it.”
Newsflash for all you ADHD attorneys out there thinking you are broken and flawed for needing to think about and create a plan in order to work effectively – neurotypical people also need to plan! How they plan and what an effective plan looks like for them might be very different than what an effective plan looks like for you, and that’s okay!
If you would like help figuring out how to make plans that work for you, that help you prioritize tasks, get started, and reduce overwhelm, you can schedule a free consultation with me at this link, or visit my website, www.MonezADHDcoaching.com.
