Indexed knows how it is
Jessica Hagy always makes me laugh, but this one made me sigh because it’s the basis and failing of all legal billing:
http://indexed.blogspot.com/2007/02/efficiency-cheap-apartment.html
Filed under: attorney, billable hours, lawyer | Leave a Comment
Back Again
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.
Filed under: depression, hours, husband, insomnia, law, lawyer, symptoms | Leave a Comment
Panic Attack Central
This past month I’ve been having panic attacks like it’s going out of style. It’s been five years since I last had them, and suddenly I’ve had like six this month alone.
My doctor is tweaking my meds, which is doubtless part of the problem. Things that have panicked me so far this month include sudden movement, spousal bickering, an overwhelming to-do list, having to drive my car, the department store, and something else I can’t remember. Spousal bickering is the one that bothers me the most, because if you’re married to someone, have a bout of bickering over whose turn it is to do the dishes, and your spouse not only bursts into tears but goes into a full-on panic attack, how are you going to feel about that? Chances are, depending on your relationship, either manipulated, or rotten and guilty for setting a panic attack off, or frustrated and like you can never talk again for fear of setting one off. My husband feels guilty. It’s not his fault, and I feel guilty that I made him feel guilty. Ah, the circle of love.
Panic attacks are horrible. People describe them as feeling like you’re dying, or having a heart attack. Mine definitely fall in the heart-attack category. I start gasping for air, usually crying and/or sobbing, and then I start shaking uncontrollably and usually break out in a sweat. I get terrified to move. And almost by definition, all rational thought has stopped, so the fact that you are sobbing uncontrollably and shaking with terror while trying to start your own damned car you’ve been driving without a problem for six years does not strike you as at all unreasonable.
After several years of therapy I can at least recognize one coming on, and I can usually gasp out to my husband between sobs “I’m having — a panic — attack.” But then all I can really do is sit somewhere and let the panic run its course, often while gripping my husband’s hand like a lifeline (it helps, it really does; it seems to keep me grounded in reality and it dampens the terror).
Afterwards, my body is so wrung out that I continue to shake for an hour or so after, and I feel exhausted, the kind of exhausted you have after you just got back from a really emotionally-draining funeral. I often get chills afterwards (maybe because of the sweating) and I have trouble concentrating. Sometimes (but not always) I have a killer, migraine-ish headache afterwards. I watch a lot of sitcom reruns during the aftermath specifically because they’re distracting but require no brainpower.
So that’s what I’ve been going through basically weekly. My doctor’s given me some Xanax as a panic attack “rescue medication” (that is, you use it at the onset of the attack, rather than as a daily drug) which really does help to reduce the duration and intensity of the attack, and makes the aftermath less horrible, but obviously does nothing to prevent the attack in the first place.
Living with me is really unpleasant right now.
Filed under: depression, drugs, panic, panic attack, symptoms, xanax | Leave a Comment
Paralysis
So it’s Monday and life doesn’t suck yet, but I have two things on my to-do list that I know is going to MAKE life suck, so I’m sitting here dawdling (and blogging) and not billing hours because I just can’t bear to dig into this and trigger a depressive episode.
On the plus side, my desk is SPECTACULARLY clean.
It’s surprising how long you can actually sit and do nothing before the world falls down around your ears, as long as you don’t mind the dearth of billables.
Filed under: billable hours, depression, symptoms | 1 Comment
Bad Day
This actually turned out to be a rotten depression day. I had to take some time alone in my office at noon to just cry — which, of course, professional women can’t do — and my afternoon has just been one long slog of trying not to give in to crying again.
Filed under: Cry, depression, professionals, symptoms | 1 Comment
Billing by the Hour
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.
Filed under: billable hours, hours, office, workplace | 4 Comments
If Only It Was All a Bad Dream
Last night I had what I think was my first law nightmare. I was trying to practice law in Britain and I wasn’t licensed as a barrister or solicitor — I can never remember which is which — and for some reason my cat was at the courthouse and my apple tree was growing pumpkin-sized fruit. I woke up in a cold sweat.
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Pro Bono
I think the local pro bono coordinator is out to get me. We have a central clearinghouse for cases that LSC can’t take that get farmed out to lawyers willing to do pro-bono. The coordinator is a really nice woman, but I swear to God, I keep getting the most obnoxious cases. The ones that should take two days and take TWO YEARS, or the ones that are on such a bizarre topic that nobody has any idea what it’s about (she has it in her head that I “like those kinds of cases” and saves them for me special), or the ones that get assigned to the worst judge in the circuit.
There’s a real push-pull on the whole issue, because the state bar is real big on attorneys doing pro bono hours, and we all have to report to the bar every year how many we’ve done. It’s not mandatory, though they keep batting around the idea of MAKING it mandatory, then deciding it would probably be unconstitutional to do so. Anyway, we’re constantly excoriated by the state bar, the local bar, local judges, and senior attorneys in PUBLIC to do more pro bono.
Close the office door, however, and Mr. Senior Attorney is telling you to quit fucking around with that pro bono case and bill some fucking hours already. I know of one firm that pushes tons of pro bono cases off on associates they intend to fire. That way they can report that they did a ridiculous number of pro bono hours every year, and fire all their unwanted associates for “failing to bill enough hours.”
Law firms don’t do “lay offs” becuase that’s a signal that the market is bad or your firm has miscalculated or you’re losing business, and apparently that’s a shameful thing. So law firms do really sleazy things so they can legitimately “fire” for cause attorneys they need to let go because of a general market contraction or loss of a major client (or poor planning or senior partners wanting more money). Try finding another job after you’ve been fired for being shitty at your last one — and they stick by that story like glue, because they don’t want you suing them.
Anyway, this one firm uses pro bono hours to fire associates it wants to get rid of. (It overhires associates as cheap labor and then fires most of them so they don’t have to promote them to higher salary levels.) Other firms just publicly encourage their associates to do pro bono and privately forbid it. One local firm, that I’m sort-of jealous of, flat-out tells its associates not to do pro bono and says publicly that they do not take time away from billing to do pro bono. At least they’re HONEST about it. Some of the associates there say they wish they COULD do pro bono, but that’s only because they’ve never worked at a firm that mandates pro bono hours and then penalizes you for doing them.
The whole thing makes me confused about whether I want to be a good person, because the professional penalties for doing so are so high. Somewhere deep in my gut there’s this good lawyer who says, “Equal access to the law is the cornestone of our democracy; lawyers MUST provide pro bono services for the system to have any credibility.” But on top of her there are like 12 layers going, “Oh my God, I need more hours.” “Oh my God, if I do pro bono I’ll get reprimanded for my billing rates being too low.” “Oh my God, I drew Judge Jerk again. Why, God, why?”
I have a vivid little play in my mind that summarizes the whole thing and goes on every year in some variation on this basic theme: Every year we have this big bar dinner where we all dress up pretty in evening clothes and go drink and schmooze and congratulate ourselves on protecting and promoting American democracy and our great system of equal justice under law. This INVARIABLY includes a grand old statesman of the local bar community giving a speech about the crucial importance of pro bono service by all the lawyers in our community. (Sometimes it also includes an actual local politician talking about the importance of law and service, usually shortly before he gets indicted.) And then, the next morning, we hear from young associates in his firm that Mr. Pro Bono Speechmaker/Managing Partner told them at the Monday morning meeting that they’d better fucking get their hours and stop fucking around with pro bono cases because they were not making their fucking quotas.
All the right words. All the wrong actions. Seems like the entire profession, sometimes.
Filed under: attorney, billable hours, court, hours, hypocrisy, law, lawyer, lsc, pro bono | Leave a Comment
Sure, It Has a Window
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.
Filed under: attorney, law, lawyer, office, professionals, workplace | 1 Comment
Back to Court, with Pain
I had court today, so of course I came down with a horrific cold over the weekend and went into court with a bright red nose, an aching ear, and a neck so stiff I couldn’t turn it. Driving to the courthouse was entertaining without being able to look side to side. I had to pull over and enjoy a rerun of breakfast.
As far as the actual hearing went, pretty painless. We were in and out in five minutes and got the order we wanted. Now all I have to do is focus on not puking until I can go home and lie down. Is not puking on a client file billable time? If I have to work despite being so sick I can barely crawl, it ought to be.
I was actually desperate to get to court today. They’re scheduling hearings four months out, so if I missed my reschedule wouldn’t have been until April, and I don’t like this client so much I want to be spending quality time with him until April. Runny nose and hacking cough be damned.
Part of me hopes I infected the entire courthouse just for spite. The rest of me liked the judge and hopes I didn’t give him a cold.
Filed under: court, sick, symptoms | 1 Comment
Depressed Lawyer 
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