I work in a law firm, which is essentially a service provider, where we charge our clients an hourly rate for the rendering of various services in the course of representing them. Our partners charge hundreds of dollars an hour. In fact, the fact that we charge for our services is how we generate revenue. The services we provide are standard and accepted through the industry. If people hire a lawyer they expect it to cost them money.
I am a support staff member who bills my own time to the client, and I am sooo tired of hearing the partners say to me about the work I do that “we can’t charge the client.”
I had that yesterday. A partner gave me an ungodly amount of work that needed to be done in an unrealistic time frame. I told him if he needs it done in a timely manner I need to send it to a vendor. He looked at me and said “We can’t charge the client.” He then went on to explain that the client is paying through the nose already and we can’t add to his financial burden.
WTF! Is the lawyer not going to charge the client for his time? Yeah right! We are in this recession and revenues are diminishing across the board, law firms are laying off staff, hiring and pay freezes are in place, and at this time we continue to believe we should not charge our clients for valid, legitimate services rendered?
One of these days I am going to hear those words and just snap.
So, this partner just expects you to do the work either in the unrealistic timeframe, or on your own time? And he expects you to suck it up in the hope that you, one day, will become partner?
Maybe he forgot that you are on the supporting staff, and dangles you the same invisible carrot he also dangles before the noses of the young lawyers working for him.
I would like to know what sacrifices the partners who say “we can’t charge the client” make themselves. Do they give the client a break on the time they charge? So if they work 5 hours on something, they only charge the client for 1 hour?
Next time I hear “We can’t charge the client” I might just start asking those questions of the partner. And risk losing my job for giving an attitude.
Seriously, if we are a for-profit organization and we are scrambling to find ways to not charge the client for legitimate services provided, I cannot see how I should find that reasonable or acceptable.
Because selling something at a reduced price is often better than losing a sale or a customer. That’s business.
At the risk of being overly presumptuous, I’d bet that, despite how annoying it is for you to hear the phrase, that your problem isn’t really whether or how or how much the client is being charged. It sounds to me like the partners there are like many lawyers at that level - they respect their own time but don’t demonstrate much respect for yours.
Sure, you’re not a partner, and your efforts don’t bring in as much moolah to the business, but the monetary value of your billable hours is not a reflection of your value as a person, or even as an employee (in a holistic sense).
I’d suggest asking the questions, without the attitude. It might be best to ask these questions in a general way, as opposed to immediately after hearing a particular client is going to be getting a discount.
Ideally, there should be something in place that allows for the support staff to get some recognition for their efforts. I don’t know how common that is in the culture, though. I do know a paralegal friend of mine (that’s her job title - the friendship is on the up-and-up) who left more than one firm for reasons similar to what you are experiencing. She bounced around a bit before settling in at a firm where her efforts are acknowledged.
I have no problem with not charging the client. I work doing and scheduling per hour services for different customers and we get this all the time. Modifying pricing to make a sale is normal.
What I do have a problem with is when they say to mark my time as non billable. My time is billable, it needs to go in the systam that I put in so much billable and utilized time. If they decide not to bill for it that is another decision but don’t devalue my time by saying it’s not billable.
If the firm makes a profit despite writing off chunks of billable work, that’s their business. It’s the managing partner’s job to decide whether a client is worth doing free work for, not yours.
Unless “devaluing your time” cuts into your paycheck, suck it up.
It sounds to me like it may not be cutting into his paycheck, but possibly affecting his perceived standing in the company, which I would guess would affect his promotion possibilities, in which case he has a legitimate gripe.
At many places where time is billed out on an hourly basis, staff are required to have a certain amount of “billable” time. for a partner, it’s likely to be nearly 100%, and for support staff it’s probably around 80 - 85%. If they are cutting into your percentage just so they can give their client a better price, that’s wrong.
We used to have project managers who would cut out billable hours from developers that they shought was excessive, even though typically it was because the project didn’t manage scope well enough. Ridiculous, and looked bad for us as well.
It varies a lot from firm to firm, but in my experience it’s not uncommon not to bill the client for all the time put in on the file, depending on the nature of the work, the client’s financial position, whether the client has a long-term relationship with the firm, and other factors.
I had some legal work done recently, and the two firms involved both gave “courtesy discounts” - they showed the exact amount of billable hours, and the amount it would cost at their billable rate, and then gave discounts to bring the amount actually billed down to the initial estimate they had given me for the work. In other words, the amount charged was the amount they had estimated, even though they had actually put in more work than estimated.
IME, fields of law where long-term client relationships are like to exist (civil defense litigation, for example) tend to be on pretty businesslike terms. Not much in the way of favors.
If there’s a deal to be cut, it will usually be on the hourly rate charged, not on the hours.
That said, there are certain things which are more or less always unbillable- fixing your own mistakes, for example.
Along with what other posters are saying, he’s probably not thinking of his billable hours as money. He’s thinking of them as billable hours. As in, he’s required to do 1900 billable hours a year and so if he writes off these 5, that’s 5 more hours he needs to do. NEEDS to do, because that’s what the law firm dictates. He’s not thinking that at $300 a hour, those 1900 hours cost the client $570,000. He’s not even thinking that the 5 hours he last spent cost the client $1,500. He’s thinking about those 5 hours and what’s going on his bottom line. He doesn’t want to come in for half a day on Sunday to “catch up” because he gave someone a freebie.
For you, on the other hand, it’s all about the benjamins.
They’re missing a good practice if they don’t bill every scrap of work done, but then choose to discount an amount (even an amount equal to all the additional work). This 1) shows the additional work, 2) establishes that you do in fact charge for the services rendered, so clients don’t get used to it being free, and 3) makes the client feel like he got the discount because you value his business.
The cost is the same either way, but itemizing all the hours and then discounting shows how much you’ve done, avoids misunderstanding on future bills, and gives the client a warm fuzzy.
I feel your pain. I am a hardworking paralegal in a small firm, and I used to go crazy because one of the associates would change my time into her time, thereby adding to the client’s bill and dropping my billed time on a case. Not only is it unethical, but it made me feel so angry, because I felt like I was not getting any recognition for my hard work.
Then, after a few years, I realized that everyone could tell how hard I worked, and the recognition would be reflected in my paycheck. I don’t really care anymore…
In my department, everything gets billed under the managing partner (of the department)'s name, so I keep my own time records and just email him my total time at the end of each month. That way anyone else who wants to take credit can, and I still get my kudos.
**Tehanu ** sounds like he/she is in litigation support. They are typically not attorney’s and therefore not on a track to partnership.
As someone who has been in professional services for over ten years, that is the reality. Unless you are an attorney in a law firm, a management consultant in a consulting firm or an accountant in an accounting firm, you are a support service. A cost, not a revenue generator.
It’s not a two-way street. The only reason supporting services even exist at their firm is because of the business and revenue generated by the partners. When you bring in million dollar clients, then you can speak to the partners on equal terms.
Bitching to the partners will cut in to his standing and promotability far worse than his utilization. Yes, it is an important metric, but it’s not usually a simple matter of “who billed the most this year”. Ultimately management remembers who busts their ass vs who complains and nickle and dimes about “billable hours” when it comes to promotion time.
My advice to you is that if you do not want to always be treated as a second class citizen (which you are FYI) by partners, don’t work in the lit support department of a law firm. Go be a consultant for a consulting firm like Navigant or Kroll, one of the Big-4 accounting firms or a vendor that provides legal profesional services. You’ll experience just as much bullshit and I think you will probably have to work harder, but at least you’ll be on a track to partner or MD.
The economy is currently in the crapper. All the law firms in my market (NYC) are, if not actually cutting back on support staff, then looking to do so in the near future. A lot of other markets aren’t doing any better.
When they’re deciding who to keep and who to street, it’s a sucker’s bet to think they’ll keep anyone other than the people who have the most billable hours. If the OP happens to work at a big firm (as I do), then the easiest method of determining who the most productive support-staff employees are is to look over their billed time for the past month/quarter/year. Chances are better than good that whoever is making the decision about who to keep and who to pink slip isn’t going to have any personal experience about support staff other than the ones he or she works with at least occasionally - which in all probability amounts to less than 10% of the total support staff. They’ll look for a hard metric to base their decision on - and that metric is likely to be “billed hours”. That is, after all, the primary metric upon which productivity in a law firm is based.
That attorney telling the OP not to bill a big pile of hours is basically sticking her with X hours during which she worked, and worked hard, on tasks that were legitimate client services but which show up on a time report precisely the same as hours spent surfing the Internet or chatting with friends or reading the newspaper. Work done and not billed might as well not be work at all - and a lot of time for which one was paid, but did not result in quantifiable benefit is exactly the sort of thing that makes the people with the pink slips give your name a hard look, come firing time.
Agreed. I had this argument at my former job. The owners can give away free stuff out the wazoo for all I care, but I want it on record the amount of work I have done so that there is no misunderstanding at the end of the year.
This is particularly true with law firm jobs like the OP has.
I do client billing at my firm occasionally. There are any number of childishly easy ways for billable time to be recorded and not actually charged to the client. There’s no real reason at all for a partner to tell someone to record work that’s legitimately billable as anything other than client-charged work.
Hell, several of the ways you can record billable time and not charge the client for it are great public relations with clients. “Look at all these hours our crack staff put in on your matter that we’ve chosen not to charge you for! You get more work for your litigation dollar out of Our Firm!”
If they don’t want the client to know about the time, all they have to do is exclude it from the bill. In either case, the person doing the work still gets their work recorded for posterity.
[QUOTE=msmith537;10882990As someone who has been in professional services for over ten years, that is the reality. Unless you are an attorney in a law firm, a management consultant in a consulting firm or an accountant in an accounting firm, you are a support service. A cost, not a revenue generator.[/QUOTE]
That may be the reality, but that does not mean it is right. Treating people in the manner described is unethical and may even be illegal in some areas.