I had a not-rotten couple of weeks — my new meds are working — but I’m back in a funk. I’m having terrible eye-strain headaches from 12-hour days at the computer. Stress kept me from sleeping for three straight days, which actually made me bill GREAT hours because I was way too tired to think at a normal sort of speed.

That day, coincidentally, the Journal of the ABA had a story about how associates want to lower billables in exchange for a pay cut and partners don’t want associates to lower billables. One of the rationales given was that partners can’t tell who’s a really good lawyer without the metric of hours. So backwards. First of all, your law firm is TOO LARGE if you can’t tell by reading their work who’s good and who sucks. And secondly, when I’m doing good work, I work quickly and don’t bill very many hours. When I’m exhausted and doing shitty work, I bill TONS of hours because it takes me forever.

I’m sure clients are delighted to be paying ridiculous amounts of money for me to stare blankly at a screen and type a word every few minutes because I haven’t slept in days on end. I know that’s EXACTLY the high quality work they want with the kind of billing inflation they need.