I recently posted about the ‘Billable hours target for first-year lawyers at selected [Australian] law firms‘ and one of the most read posts on this blog is from way back in August 2016 – ‘Why asking someone to work 2,000 billable hours a year will kill their spirit‘, so when the Managing Partner Forum recently published the above results (admittedly from mostly American Managing Partners) from an audience polling question at one of its webinars on the issue of billable hour expectation for Associate Attorneys, I thought I would share it.

It’s interesting to note that nearly 70% of respondents expect their Associate Attorneys to bill over 1700 hours a year, with almost 10% expecting over 1900 billable hours per year.

That’s a lot of billable hours! And if we consider the ‘10-20-30-40 Leverage Rule‘, then the implication is very bleak for junior lawyers!

And as I say to those entering the legal profession who need some understanding of how many hours they need to work to meet their billable hour target, take a look at Yale Law School’s ‘The Truth About The Billable Hour‘.

While I am all for the profit motive, I maintain that if owners and managers of law firms want to understand why they have a high attrition / burnout rate in their teams, take a close look at what expecting someone to bill 1700 hours a year is actually doing to them!

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