Unbillable Hours: A True Story

by Ian Graham

  Our escape plan worked for about an hour, until Susan Clark, the firm’s head administrator and the person in charge of LWU, walked by the lobby bar and spotted about twenty of us drinking beer and watching football. We were marched back into the conference room like misbehaving schoolchildren just as the pro bono presentation was beginning.

  Mark Hensler, a partner on Latham’s Pro Bono Committee, was explaining the firm’s commitment to this work. Pro bono publico — for the public good — is a tradition of the legal profession founded on the idea that every lawyer should devote at least a portion of his or her time to representing indigent clients or worthy causes for free. Like every major law firm, Latham had an organized pro bono program in which young attorneys were encouraged to take on projects approved by the firm and supervised by more experienced attorneys. Firms do this for the good of the community, to provide hands-on experience for junior attorneys, and because there is overwhelming peer pressure within the legal profession to do it. From a public-relations standpoint, pro bono is a very big deal for law firms. Legal publications rate firms’ pro bono programs, and firms tout their pro bono programs and the pro bono successes of their attorneys to their clients and recruits.

  The majority of pro bono cases handled by Latham and other big firms involve relatively simple immigration, family, or misdemeanor issues, the kind of things one or two junior attorneys can handle in a few weeks. “It’s a good way to get hands-on legal experience as a junior associate,” Hensler said.

  I sat there half-listening, bitter about missing the game.

  On Sunday morning, we were piled into buses and taken for a day of team-building activities at a park outside of Reston. It felt good to get out of the meetings, but there was a general consensus that this team-building thing was lame and meant for middle-school kids, sorority girls, or weak-minded professionals who couldn’t accomplish things on their own. Teamwork is not something in most lawyers’ — particularly young lawyers’ — DNA. And the Latham stubs, accustomed to being at the top of their class, were looking for ways to stand out from the pack, not join it.

  The counselors divided us into teams and gave us tasks meant to require teamwork and communication to accomplish: getting every team member onto a small wooden square, building a soap-box car from odd materials. Quickly, my team degenerated into a Lord of the Flies sequel, as the alphas and wannabe alphas tried to assert themselves and everyone else refused to take direction or cooperate. The counselors tried to help, but were pushed aside and their advice ignored. By the end of the day we had failed miserably at every task, and our counselor was a broken man, looking as though he had just witnessed a bad auto accident.

  The final activity before we returned to our offices to start our legal careers was the friendship circle, where I held hands with Igor. It felt ridiculous at the time: a group of adults standing in a circle, holding hands. We were lawyers, not eighth-graders. We didn’t need to hold hands; we didn’t even need to be friends. But it was fitting, in a way. We were starting our Latham career together, as equals. Despite what some of us may have thought privately, at this point, there were no superstars, no one was on the partnership track, no one had been designated a slacker. We were Latham’s associate class of 2001, and for several years, like high-school freshmen, we would climb the ranks together — junior associates for two years, then mid-level associates from our third to our fifth years, and senior associates in years six and seven. In our eighth year, those who remained from our class would be eligible to be considered for partnership.

  We were bonded, at this point, by what we did not know. Despite three years of law school and a summer at Latham, most of us had little idea what real day-to-day law practice was like. Our summer associate experience had been about recruiting, and Latham had gone to great expense and effort to distract us from seeing the reality. Our law school education had been an intellectual exercise, teaching us to “think like lawyers” and, to a certain extent, teaching us what the law was, but telling us almost nothing about the practice of law. For example, I knew what a complaint was, but I had no idea how to draft or file one.

  But like the link between Igor and me, our bond was delicate. We had all come to Latham for our own reasons, with our own personalities and ambitions. We would be measured against one another, in how many hours we billed, the type of work we were doing, how much responsibility we took on. The defining statement in our associate reviews would be “Is [associate X] performing at a level consistent with his class?” This would breed jealousy, passive-aggressive maneuvering for the best assignments, and in some cases, outright hostility.

  And statistically, we wouldn’t stay bonded for long. Through a combination of voluntary and involuntary departures, 20 percent of us would leave the firm by the end of our first year, 40 percent by the end of the second. About 80 percent of us wouldn’t make it to our fifth year. And by the eighth year, when we were up for partnership, only a handful of us, maybe one or two in each office, would remain.

  CHAPTER 4

  Baby Sharks

  LOS ANGELES, OCTOBER 2001

  I AM LIVING near the beach in Santa Monica, in a two-bedroom apartment I share with Matt Barnes, one of my friends from the previous summer and a fellow stub. It’s exciting to be back in LA, and I’m looking forward to starting work and seeing friends from the past summer.

  Matt started work the week before, and I haven’t seen much of him. On returning from LWU, he went straight from the airport to the office. As far as I can tell, he has not been back to the apartment, which means he is either still at the office or hung over in some girl’s apartment. Matt seems resolved not to let his career interfere with his nightlife. He lives on fumes, getting up at 5:00 A.M. to work out, working late, and then storming the bars and nightclubs of Hollywood and Santa Monica like a social bulldozer running on vodka and soda, charging up to attractive girls fearlessly, introducing himself as “the half-Asian,” or “zero-point-five,” and offering to show them which parts are Asian and which parts not. Amazingly — or maybe not, since he is an athletic, good-looking guy with a Harvard Law degree and a six-figure job — girls find him charming. He doesn’t sleep so much as collapse from exhaustion for a few hours. And he likes it that way.

  All Matt has said about work so far is, “It’s a different place, bro. You’ll see.”

  I ARRIVED AT Latham’s main reception, on the fortieth floor, at a few minutes after eight. Our day wasn’t scheduled to begin until eight thirty, but most of the forty-seven other stubs were already there, and the lobby buzzed with nervous energy. Most of us had been summer associates together, so it was a reunion of sorts. I nodded to familiar faces as I moved through the crowd to the couch area, where my friends Trevor Wilson and Mike Wilke were sitting with a few others.

  “Loogat dis fuggin guy,” Wilke greeted me in his Long Island accent, smacking me on the back so hard my teeth rattled. “You ready for this, Graham?” Trevor was doubled over with laughter as Jeff Hicks was explaining that the bright red Hawaiian shirt with denim sleeves he had selected for his first day of work was his own design. “Yep, I designed this baby myself. Pretty sweet, huh?”

  It was a sign of the times. A few years earlier, Latham and most other West Coast law firms had adopted a “business casual” dress code to help them compete for talent against the dot-coms, whose employees wore shorts and flip-flops. While this was popular with a lot of Latham’s young recruits, taking away their dark-suit uniforms gave lawyers a broader choice, and that was not necessarily a good thing for a lot of them. A few of the older ones had even given up and gone back to wearing suits every day.

  As we milled around, Brooke Levin, a third-year associate who had taken us to dinner and drinks a half-dozen times the previous summer, walked through the lobby. “Hey, Brooke!” we called out and waved. Brooke never broke stride. She turned her head and stared at us for a moment, showing no recognition, and kept walking.

  “What the fuck was that?” Wilke said as w
e stood there frozen in mid-wave.

  “Jeeesusss,” Trevor whispered, “I guess the recruiting really is over. Welcome to the real Latham.”

  Maybe it was a statement that recruiting was over and that stubs like us shouldn’t be hollering and waving at third-year associates, or maybe Brooke just wasn’t wearing her contact lenses. But combined with Jim Arnold’s performance at LWU weekend, her response stirred an uncomfortable thought: Maybe this isn’t the same place, and these aren’t the same people we saw last summer.

  At exactly 8:30, someone from Human Resources rounded us up and herded us down the elevators to the sixth floor, where we shuffled past a picture of the Hindenburg exploding in flames and into Conference Room C to begin our legal careers. Waiting for us in the center of the room was Elaine Sherman, the managing partner of the LA office. In her early fifties, well-coiffed, and intense, Elaine was one of the most powerful people in the office, and therefore, to me, terrifying. In my one brief conversation with her the previous summer, I’d felt as if I had been pulled over by the cops and they were running my plates. The rumor among the associates was that she had been appointed managing partner to restore order to the LA office after a wild spell in the 1980s and early ’90s, when, so the rumor went, lawyers were doing cocaine off their desks, and empty conference rooms were serving as informal red-light districts. (The word was that former Latham associates had written for L.A. Law and had used real stories for some of the more sensational plot lines.) It was hard to imagine Latham ever being that wild, but if it had been, Elaine seemed the perfect antidote. She parted her lips and flashed her teeth in what I took to be a smile and welcomed us to the firm by getting right down to business: “Despite the rumors you might have heard about the economy and layoffs, we are happy to see you. And we do not have any current plans for layoffs.”

  Immediately a hand shot up.

  “When you say ‘no current plans,’ does that mean the firm is or will be contemplating layoffs in the future?” asked Lauren Baker, the former president of the UCLA Law Review.

  Elaine paused and smirked, as if at the skinny little stub’s boldness. “I can’t predict the future, but as of right now, we have no plans for layoffs.”

  Another hand.

  “So the firm would consider laying off associates in the future? Is there a timetable for making a decision? Will we be updated?” This was from Megan Sullivan, from Chicago Law.

  I was surprised by my stubmates’ readiness to challenge the managing partner on their first day, and about something that she had just assured us was not under consideration. It was a down economy and we were lucky just to have jobs. But newly hired associates, I would learn, often come into big law firms eager to show off their lawyering skills, and with an inflated view of their worth and bargaining leverage. The following year, a stub from Stanford would attempt to lead a revolt via firm-wide email over Latham’s decision to take away the associates’ $5,000 office decorating budget. Another stub that year threw a tantrum at a meeting over the fact that the firm’s firewall prevented him from going on eBay while at work. It’s the nature of the beast. These were accomplished people, most having been top students at top law schools, trained to argue and eager to seek out injustice, real or perceived, and to be heard: baby sharks looking to sharpen their teeth. If Latham wasn’t going to pay top-of-the-market salaries, or was going to drop ominous hints about layoffs, these people were sure they had other options. And having been fawned over the previous summer, they were sure their departure would be crushing to Latham.

  Elaine brushed off the questions by explaining that despite the economic slowdown, Latham was in the middle of the busiest and most prosperous period in its history. And we, the firm’s largest stub class ever, were expected to step in and help shoulder the workload. “You are here because we believe every one of you is a Latham-quality lawyer. Everyone in this room is intelligent and capable of doing excellent work. We assume that you will be careful and diligent at each task for each matter you work on. Attention to detail is very important here.” And then, having more important things to do, she turned us over to a partner on the firm’s Associates Committee — the “Ass. Com.,” which monitored associates’ hours and conducted our performance reviews.

  “You are required to record your time in six-minute increments,” he told us, handing out examples of our time sheets: white pages with 240 little boxes representing every six minutes of a twenty-four-hour day. “It’s critically important that you do your time currently and that you turn in your time sheets at the end of every day.”

  He didn’t tell us exactly what, or how much, we were supposed to record as billable time. I would learn that no lawyer ever wants to discuss that subject, because there is no one answer. What goes into those six-minute boxes, and how many of them are filled out, can be very subjective. But I didn’t know that on my first day, and the Ass. Com. partner only gave us generalities.

  “You bill whenever you’re working or thinking about a client matter,” he said. “Be honest. That is the most important thing. Never inflate or discount your time. You are expected to work efficiently, but if something takes you ten hours to finish that you think should have taken you only five, put in for ten. It’s the partner’s job to make any necessary adjustments to the bill, not yours. We are in the business of client service, and billable hours are our product. It’s an important part of what we do.”

  The Ass. Com. partner explained that the sluggish economy had done little more than shift the weight of the work at Latham among the departments. The Corporate Mergers and Acquisitions group had been hit hardest and had slowed to only 100 percent of “pace” — i.e., the firm’s budgeted minimum of 1,900 billable hours a year for associates. The Bankruptcy and Litigation departments, however, were going flat-out — which sounded ominous — with most associates in those departments billing between 110 and 160 percent of pace. I doodled on the notepad in front of me: 160 percent of 1,900 equaled 3,040 hours a year, which broke down to almost 60 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, without counting commuting time and firm meetings.

  Though we were required to bill a minimum of 1,900 hours a year, most associates billed between 2,000 and 2,600 hours. Again, I did the math: 10 billable hours a day times 5 days a week times 52 weeks a year equaled 2,600. And those were only billable hours. Another 20 to 30 percent of our time would be unbillable — spent in firm meetings, recording our time, and sitting on the LA freeways going to and from work. So unless we seriously padded our hours, the upper figure was not 2,600, but possibly as many as 3,380 total hours spent on work alone: the equivalent of 9 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.

  For two years, we would be “unassigned associates” — not assigned to specialized departments — and thus fair game to anyone. Any assignments we received would come from “The Book,” the compilation of all matters that needed more staffing by associates. “But you should be proactive as well,” the Ass. Com. partner continued. “If you have additional capacity, email The Book for new assignments or knock on partners’ doors and introduce yourself. It is your responsibility to stay on pace.”

  Twice a year the Associates Committee would meet to review our billable hours and comments from our supervising attorneys. Then a partner or senior associate from the Ass. Com. would tell us how we were doing and give us “the message” from the committee. “We take these reviews seriously, and so should you,” he said. He didn’t say it, but we all knew that a single less-than-great review could knock an associate off the partnership track, and a bad review from a partner could torpedo an associate’s career at the firm.

  Next we were whipped through training on Westlaw and Lexis, complicated legal research programs seemingly designed for maximum user confusion. If used incorrectly, they can easily run a client’s bill through the roof. We were then given a binder with our firm ID cards and codes and told to go to our offices and await our first assignments.

  On the way to my office, I began leafing through
the binder. The first page, with my name printed at the top, held the most important information I’d received all day. I was Latham attorney number 07249. I would need this number every time I logged on to the firm’s computer system, filled out a time sheet, performed Lexis or Westlaw research, or signed in for lunch at the firm’s cafeteria. “Joe Theisman, Ken Griffey, Jr., Ted Williams” — 7, 24, 9 — I repeated, committing the number to memory.

  My office was on the thirty-seventh floor, office number 3737, and my secretary’s name was Debbie. In the pocket of the binder was a magnetized key card for using the elevator and getting into each of the firm’s floors, which were secured by locked glass doors. I got into an elevator and headed for thirty-seven. After fumbling with my key card and pushing through the glass doors, I’d taken no more than ten steps when I heard a string of names paged over the loudspeaker, including mine. I remembered from the previous summer that people were constantly being paged throughout the day, but I had never been paged before and had no idea what to do. I picked up my pace until I spotted my office, with the silver nameplate next to the door. I dropped my binder and other orientation materials on my desk and picked up the phone. Not knowing what else to do, I pressed zero.

  “Operator.”

  “Hi. I was just paged. This is my first day, and I’m not sure what to do.”

  “Hold please.”