Too many hours?

A recent, rather alarming Posner opinion - finding, in essence, that 13.7 hours were simply too many for a firm to spend on a 4-page brief - has generated a wealth of commentary.  This prompted me to calculate how many hours per page it's taken me to produce briefs so far in my short law-firm career.  The answer: according to Posner, apparently far too many.  I've always considered myself a relatively fast writer, and the briefs I've written so far have not been terribly complex.  However, writing in a highly structured format in a way that will be acceptable to a relatively large group of people simply takes a lot of time.  If anything, the number of hours I bill doesn't fully reflect the time I spend; my billable hours don't, for example, account for the time I spend thinking about the brief when not in front of a computer, even though that's often considerable.

Some commentators have pointed out the irony of Posner, of all people, determining that a price the market will clearly bear is nonetheless, as Posner puts it, "too high."  I have to wonder if Posner's pride in his own legendarily prolific output trumped ideology here.  I'm sure Posner can't imagine needing 13 hours to write a four-page document himself; he could probably churn it out before breakfast.  On the other hand, it has probably been many years since Posner had to write work that had to meet specific page and format constraints, or that was subject to anyone else's approval.  Further, as another Prawfsblawg entry coincidentally points out, there are times when Posner's own work could use a little editing.

Comments

[MT]

If Posner thinks it's "one-time-fits-all" then he's made a silly premise. You don't come out of school knowing all you need to know. So when you land in the real world a lot of your reading, even on a project for a client, ought to be regarded as professional development--and I think implicitly we do regard it this way. The partner ought to be speedier than the associate. In the manner of a mortgage, the proportion of the work that goes to the client goes to 100% as apprentice matures into the journeyman or senior partner. Because hours means little without know whose hours one is talking about, I suppose Posner must have had at least half in mind the legal scenario that the brief in question was addressing. Consciously or unconsciously he would have said to himself "Well this is a no-brainer, so a partner would do it in 1 and a new associate in 20 but no industry reasonably bills for the number of hours its apprentices take to do things: Call it 13"