The fault then would be on whoever is doing the managing. At least in our system, there are codes for unbillable time (professional, business development, firm). If an employees’s billable target is not being met, but they have a plethora of unbillable time, whoever is doing the managing partner should be asking the employee why - and if the answer is “Partner X told me to do all this work but not bill it to the client”, then it is Partner X, not the employee, who should take the hit.
If on the other hand Partner X is asking the employee to keep their time out of the system at all - that is, not enter it as either billable or non-billable - that is a real problem and the employee should bring it to the attention of the managing partner. Better than simply waiting to get disciplined for “not working” when you are really working hard.
No, I didn’t. I’m fine with my career choice. I worked those hours because, until recently, I got paid for working those hours. All very capitalist, Milton Friedman/Ayn Rand approved. And what’s with the name-calling?
My compensation should be what my employer and I have agreed upon. What I object to is their reneging on that agreement by compelling me to work unpaid overtime.
I generally think “my [former] boss is a cheap jerk” when my prior employer is whining that profits are down by half, but that still means partners are taking home nearly $1 million/year on average, and nickel-and-diming associates and paralegals and admin staff about overtime that is necessary to meet client expectations. Yeah, your comp didn’t hit a million this year? My heart bleeds for you.
I am guessing it is a partnership, and as such, the partners get to decide the business model. If they think it is better in the long run to stay in the good graces of a client to not charge, then why do you care? Are you not getting paid? It is the long term financial interests of the partners that matter in a law firm, and the idea may not be to make as much profit as possible anyway - there are tax implications in a partnership like that, and the partners may be managing their tax burdens among themselves in a way that is not transparent to you. Nor should it necessarily be.
It is like if you went to a restaurant and didn’t have a great experience for one reason or another. A manager or chef or whoever has some discretion to simply comp the meal, even though you ate it.
If nothing else, this comes out of the marketing budget in a sense.
If I were you, I’d take careful note of the fact that in these tough times, there are already vendors in place that can do your job on short notice at presumably less cost. Look to see the history of “outsourcing” in other industries such as software development - that is precisely how it works, and then the original jobs go away.
Don’t say no one warned you to think about how to make yourself indispensable
A lot of what I do involves creating business models that align the interests of investors, owners, employees and hopefully create customers as a result.
While I don’t do any work for attorneys of that nature, it has not escaped my notice in that and other areas that ownership structures in partnerships can work against getting the necessary buy-in from good employees and keeping them.
In a very real sense, this is why revolutions are about ownership rights. It is serious stuff.
In my experience, it meant that by all appearances, I wasn’t working hard, when in fact I was - and on tasks that management specifically required me to perform, but did not acknowledge in the same way as billable tasks. Which, in turn, affected my performance evaluation, and therefore, my future compensation. But it didn’t mean that the non-billable tasks were any less necessary.
I suspect that there is very little about the legal industry that Ayn Rand would approve of.
Oh, I wasn’t calling you names. I just meant that when you work in one of those support roles in a law firm (or investment bank or consulting firm for that matter), quite often you get treated like shit. And unlike the associates (who also get treated like shit), it’s not worth it for you.
Ha ha, very cute. :rolleyes:
No, I am not a lawyer. I just have a different perspective on the issue that you do.
This is a management issue. Way to deal with it ought to be to take it up with whoever is in charge of doing evaluations.
I’ve had many a battle over how compensation is measured; quite often I’ve emerged victorious (I’m an associate at a large Canadian firm). If you don’t press the issue though, they will continue to take advantage of you, or subject you to unfairness - and in some cases it is just that the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing. Don’t except “but this is how we do things” as an answer.
The key to everything is bargaining power - good support staff have lots and lots of bargaining power, because (trust me on this) they are hard to come by and Partners earning those gynormous draws do not want to lose them. If you do good work, demand to be treated fairly.
That would be the same person who was managing me. The one whose boss thought she was the best thing since sliced bread, as long as she could show she was saving the company money.
ETA I should clarify that this as when I was working in an in-house legal department, not in a law firm.
This is true. Regardless of whether you are an associate or on the support staff, you gain more negotiating power the longer you are at a firm and the more you demonstrate competancy.
Unless you worked at my old job. Then it was all about favoritism.
I was a law firm associate and there was a huge problem at one firm where the partners would establish billing targets, but partners would…
Fail to give associates enough work to do in a timely manner to hit the targets;
Load associates up with non-billable work;
Make silly superficial “revisions” to associate work to justify partners billing partrner time on a project while cutting associate time (effectively time stealing);
Cut associate time while giving associates exactly ZERO credit or acknowledgment in annual reviews for time worked but not billed out to a client.
We were told to enter all associate time into the system, and partners would be responsible for cutting that time, at the discretion of the billing partner. Once I spent some time researching a procedural issue, expecting the partner would ultimately cut that time from the client’s bill. The partner left the time in the bill, and the client was pissed for being billed for what was essentially my learning curve. I got the blame for pissing off the client even though I was told never to cut my own time.
One partner was notorious for saying “spend 1 hour on this” knowing full well to do the job right would likely take more than 1 hour. So, I would do the job right, but it might take 2 hours. The client would get the right result but I would get credit for only 1 hour, while the other hour cut was essentially thrown into the trash as if I had been doing nothing for that additional hour.
These unreasonably short time frames got so annoying that I decided if a partner gave me 1 hour to do something, then I would take only 1 hour and stop, regardless of whether the job was done. The partner came to check in on me and asked if I finished the job. I said I was not able to complete the job in the 1 hour provided, but I would be happy to complete it if allocated more billable time to it. He obviously didn’t like my attitude.
The firm hit a slow period over one winter, and despite my constantly asking for projects to do, the partners gave me nothing. Come review time, I got reamed for failing to hit billing targets, the partners knowing full well the entire firm was slow all winter.
From what you wrote, it was crystal clear your boss was informing you that you needed to work unpaid overtime to meet the workload. In addition, he was telling you that he BETTER NOT SEE or HEAR about you working that unpaid overtime because what he was asking was unethical and illegal.
He did it in a 100% deniable way…but he DID say it. He was not clueless or uninformed.
You didn’t do this…so he slammed you in the evaluation. Basically saying “Next time I do this to you you had better do it or I will find someone who will”.
{Written by Bduck…who has been in your situation before more than once }
Many times this is easier said then done, but the area I am with in my company (statistical support) has reached this ideal (so far). We are often asked to do things unbillable but we can refuse now because we have reached this.
In fact, I did it so well that I was very well liked and an ‘extremely valuable’ employee at the company. After I left, I was told for years by people I knew there that they still talked about how great I was.
Yup…I was a real Patsy.
However, there was method behind my madness…er…patsyism. I worked in a field that WAS valued by some companies but not all. I worked what was essentially ‘statistical support’ (think math-geek). The company I worked for was run by and staffed by Humanities-types who devalued math geekiness. Fortunately, not all companies do this :). I had left teaching and was my first job post-teaching and I really threw myself into it. Not just youthful enthusiasm but I had done some research and found out that a person could make a good living (not high off the hog…but good) doing this…what you needed was EXPERIENCE! This I got in spades.
Unfortunately for them, they valued this experience at about 10% more than other low level scum and a lower amount then Humanity-type ignoramus ‘stars’.
So, I gave them 4 years then took a position at almost triple the salary (which was still over 6x I was making teaching just 4 years previously).
Looking back, it was amazing what they let me do. I sold, talked to clients, published articles, upsold to existing clients, dealt with their research experts, implemented processes that literally increased efficiency of data dealing over 10x…etc etc…and they LOVED me…but would only give me little raises above what other grunts weer getting. It was really strange to be flying to another city, meeting with a client, sitting in a room with folks making huge bucks (including ones from my company) while I was making about $32K a year.
I’m sure many people thought me a Patsy and that I was stupid as hell. The reality was that if I didn’t do it, demanding the salary then I wouldn’t have been allowed to do it. Just doing it while asking for more money (not demanding) meant I could do it and get loads of good experience.
Thing is, Eva Luna’s interest lies not in getting them to change their ways per se, but to secure acceptable treatment from the people who led her to believe that they intended to treat her acceptably when they offered her employment.
It’s moot anyway - I haven’t worked there in more than 2-1/2 years. Thank goodness.
And from that experience, I have learned that I never again want to work in a large, publicly owned corporation; in my experience, shareholder value trumps common sense. (How does it make sense to have a flat budget in a department in which workload has more than doubled from that contemplated when the current budget was created?) I am much happier in the privately held partnerships; in my experience, management tends to do what makes sense in the long run, whenever possible.
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