New York Lawyer
January 27, 2005

Q:
I'm a 2L, and I've accepted an offer at a large firm in NYC.

Could you tell me how billable hours translate into real hours worked?

I've heard everything from 90 percent of all hours are billable to a 2-1 ratio for real/billable hours. Obviously, there are many factors involved here, but can you make some sense of it?

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A:

As with so many issues -- it depends.

Most lawyers don�t receive a lot of training on billing. They�re usually told the system the firm uses (that billing is measured in six- or ten-minute increments) and instructed to record their time as they go along. So it�s not like anybody starts out with a real sense of the nuance and problems that go with billing.

A revealing article, at http://www.law.yale.edu/outside/html/Career_Development/cdo-billable.htm, breaks down a typical lawyer�s day and adds up the number of billables you can accumulate (assuming you take lunch, have breaks, etc.). It makes the point (whether you agree with the actual breakdown of hours or not) that your time at the office cannot possibly be all billable. There are times when you have a crunch and you are billing huge numbers of hours, working as hard as you can, when you will (effortlessly) have much greater billables than you do ordinarily. But usually you will stitch together billables from a wide variety of matters in an effort to hit your daily or weekly target.

For example, in a 10-hour day, you would probably bill 7 to 8 hours. (That�s the approximate 2:1 ratio you�ve heard about.) You have to talk to people, after all; you will probably want to eat lunch; you need to keep up with legal periodicals and developments; and you have to, you know, hit the bathroom now and then. A normal person simply has to be at the office far longer than her billing will suggest. At a large firm in NYC, the hours will be longer because the billable requirements are higher. So to bill 2200 hours, for example, you probably will need to work a total of about 3000 hours. (Don�t even think about adding in the commute.)

Certainly it�s a challenge -- and it�s the bane of the profession. Many, many people, upon leaving law firm life, state first and foremost how happy they are to be freed from the tyranny of the billable hour. Of course, the longer you�re at it, the more you�ll get used to keeping tracking of your time and be more efficient and disciplined about it.

Sincerely,
Holly English