For all the melodramatic accounts that float around every so often about the miseries of a junior associate's life, I rarely see discussions of the unpleasantness of billing hours, in and of itself. So far, it's actually the only thing that really, conclusively makes me unhappy at my job. The billable-hour expectations where I work are actually fairly reasonable, all things being equal, but the process still nonetheless makes the job suck, at least for me. Part of it is my own quirky working style; I confess that I'm a bit dreamy and lazy, and it takes me a while to actually settle in and get going on a task, particularly one that requires any creativity. In jobs I had pre-law school, I was able to compensate for these flaws by being fairly focused and efficient once I actually got going. Obviously, in a law firm, that doesn't work. My productivity measured by, say, how many motions I've written is high; nonetheless, my billable hours are low.
Then there are days like today. A project I was working on that I expected to take about 8 hours took more like 2. For the first time in a while, all my cases are slow, so there's nothing I can immediately turn to. The natural thing to do is to ask to get on another case, but unless I get assigned one, like, right this minute, I'll have a deficit of several hours for the month - which, added to the several-hour deficit I accumulated last week, means a full working weekend, or else several late nights, to get up to par. I suppose I should have pre-emptively gotten on another case last week, but it was hard to tell at that point how things would shape up this week, and overcommitting often puts me in the position of having 3 things due for different cases at once, and no way to get them all done competently.
I suppose I'm lucky in that I'm now trying to start on another law review article, and slow times enable me to get work done. Still, it's hard to clear my head of the nagging guilt/anxiety/fear of getting an end-of-month talking-to that's been fairly constant since I started this job.
Comments