I HATE the billable hour.

The problems with the billable hour are manifold:

1) It rewards slow work and penalizes the efficient. If I can write a contract in two hours, and the guy across the hall takes four hours, HE gets a bonus at the end of the year. I get reprimanded for not billing enough hours.

In my experience, this tends to penalize better lawyers, who tend to read faster and work more efficiently, with fewer false starts.

2) It encourages lying. Your entire performance evaluation, unless you spectacularly fuck up, as an associate is based on billable hours. I see when people come and go from their offices (and not just here, but at other firms). I see them at social events. I KNOW they didn’t bill 80 hours last week. But that’s what they “bill.”

3) It’s bad for clients, because it lets lawyers charge basically whatever they want. Okay, fine, in a litigation. But a lot of legal work could easily be set-fee — that standard contract is worth $500 whether we have a brand-new attorney take six hours to draft it or an experienced one take half an hour. Why is the exact same work worth different amounts?

4) Did I mention it penalizes efficiency?

I liked working in an environment that was product-oriented a lot better. When you finished the day’s tasks, you got to go home. When I was working as a document monkey on this particularly enormous litigation, it was not unusual at all for me to read THREE TIMES as many pages as the guy across the hall who had the same job in eight hours. He often actually stayed late just to read 1/3 as many pages as I did. So let’s say I read 1,000 pages in 8 hours, and he read 300 pages in 10. (Just for nice round, ridiculous numbers.) *I* would get reprimanded at the end of the week for only billling 40 hours versus his 50 hours, while I had produced THREE TIMES the amount of product for the firm. (And he was always missing deadlines. I was always ahead of them.)

It’s a system of really fucking perverse incentives that rewards someone who works slowly and misses deadlines and penalizes someone who works quickly and makes them. But the only thing that mattered is how many hours we billed.

The IT guy outright told me to lie. “Everybody else is dicking around on the internet playing games for 15 minutes of every hour they bill.” (Billing was via a program the IT guy was responsible for creating reports from weekly — he would check it against internet use logs for his own amusement.) “And most of them are IMing all day long no matter what they’re billing on. You should just write down how many hours you NEED. They don’t care how much work you get done as long as you get the hours, and they’ll never know since you’re getting more done than anyone else at your level anyway.”

You hear that, clients? Joe Attorney is billing you $300/hour for playing poker online. Everybody knows. And nobody cares.

One of the things I hate most about the “workplace” aspects of my job (the parts that aren’t confined to being a lawyer, but just the part where you have to go work somewhere) is sitting in my little white-walled box with a window.

So cubicles are worse. I worked in cubicles and hated it — I always felt like I feel in a crowded train station, where I’m just slightly too short to see where the hell I’m going, but I can hear all these interesting things going on. It was at once distracting and isolating.

But prior to this, I spent a lot of time working in open offices — newsrooms, charitable organizations — where all the desks are just in one big room. I found this energizing and interesting rather than distracting; there was always a lot going on, always someone to bounce and idea off of or shoot the shit with between bursts of work, always people laughing or bitching.

Now I sit in a white box that belongs to me, and has a window. This is supposed to be one of the perks of being a lawyer, a private office with actual walls (rather than a cubicle) and a WINDOW, the deepest longing of middle management, if popular culture is to be believed. Window offices mostly look at roofs, other office buildings, or parking structures, so the view isn’t all that exciting, but at least it is some actual natural light.

So I sit here in a small white room with a window all by myself for 10 hours a day. They do that with people in insane asylums, too, except in an insane asylum they give you things to play with. I’m supposed to be writing excruciatingly boring filings on matters nobody really gives a rat’s ass about.

Sometimes other law-office drones pop their heads in to get something from me or see if I need anything. Nurses in insane asylums either bring you good drugs or new toys. The best I get offered is coffee, which I don’t drink. But mostly I just sit there, in the quiet, pristine little office of my own being lonely.

The window doesn’t open — ever since air conditioning was invented, that’s no longer the old law for office buildings, that every person has to be no more than 30 feet from natural light and air. The walls are dull and just cheap office-building divider walls, so if we move they can renovate the office really fast, so they’re not real good at holding up pictures or anything. Not that I’ve gotten around to framing my plethora of diplomas and bar admissions anyway, the ones I’m supposed to hang behind my head to impress people. Who am I going to impress? Everyone else has them too, and it’s not like clients go into lawyer’s offices; that’s why there are conference rooms. I have no control over the temperature, and because of these big windows the lawyers’ offices get viciously hot in the summer with the sun beating in and brutally cold in the winter because they’re poorly insulated.

So here’s the workplace dream of American executives: I sit all alone and lonely in a little 225 sq. foot dull white box, listening to the electricity humming in the walls and the flourescents buzzing overhead, with a window that doesn’t open and looks at nothing and absolutely no control over the temperature of my office. Also, my door sticks.

Boy, America, I have it made.