Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. I practiced law for 10 years and now I help unhappy lawyers ditch their soul-sucking jobs. On this show, I share advice and strategies for aspiring former lawyers, and interviews with former lawyers who have left the law behind to find careers and lives that they love.

Okay, today I want to talk about something that is just a ridiculous fiction that I think is perpetrated and permeates so many law firms and it's around the question of billables and getting work.

Here's the thing first. You know that we've talked in the podcast before about my view about billables, which is that it is so frequently used as a criticism of associates. Like, “Oh, you're billables. You're not getting enough billables, blah, blah, blah.”

The reality is that in 95% of those scenarios, it is because the work isn't there and it is not actually an appropriate criticism of a more junior lawyer because they are not responsible for generating work.

Unless it's an extreme circumstance where someone is literally avoiding doing billable work, and that can actually be documented—which basically is never actually the case, except in very rare exceptions—the lack of billables is not something that should be treated as a failure on the part of an associate, or even like a more junior partner, depending on the circumstances, and yet it so often is.

That's the baseline. It is wild to me that you can have an environment where someone is not being given work and then is being faulted for not doing work. A corollary to that is this idea that you should be fixing the problem of not having billables by going out and getting work from people.

Here's why I say that. I just think it is so ridiculous that there's this idea of like, “Oh, well, you're not getting enough billable work.” Well, the fix for that is not for the people who are responsible for bringing in work to bring in more work. The fix for that is that you as the associate really need to be out there, knocking on doors, asking people for work, et cetera, et cetera.

I know that if you were an associate or ever were an associate, and you are listening to this podcast, you have had the experience of looking for work, emailing people that you need work, emailing your department head, and going around your office.

There's only so much that you can ask people for work. The fact that it is treated as like, “Oh, this is the associate's job” is additionally bananas, because we also know that partners, department heads, whoever is in charge of monitoring people's hours, depending on the way your firm does it, has access to the information about the billables that you have, and therefore should be able to direct more work to people who need the work.

There's this weird idea that the people in the position of being able to see who has work and who might need work are somehow helpless to remedy that situation. In fact, the remedy is supposed to come from you wandering around your floor of your office knocking on people's doors and/or just incessantly emailing people and asking them to give you work.

I just think it is a ridiculous form of gaslighting that creates so much anxiety understandably for junior lawyers because I have never met someone who is not hitting their hours, who is not also basically stressing about not hitting their hours and doing all of the things and running up against the limitation of you can only email people so many times. You can only walk around so many times.

It is so toxic to literally not have the work to give to people or to not be structuring the work in a way that allows you to give work to everyone who needs it. Let's do a little side detour.

The other problem that you often see in these scenarios where someone isn't hitting their billables and is being told, “You need to go out and whatever, get more work,” there's almost always a scenario where some of the associates are on matters where they are billing ridiculous numbers of hours and then there are other people who are not hitting their hours.

There are lots of different reasons for that around staffing and clients being willing to only have a certain number of people, like staff to a matter, et cetera, et cetera. But again, there is always this sense, I feel like, in law firms of, “Well, what could we possibly do about this scenario? There's nothing we can do.”

It's just like, “No, there are so many things that you could do.” Instead you are turning this into the problem of the least powerful lawyer in this scenario. The one who does not have control over a work allocation, the one who does not have the ability to see the distribution of work and do anything about it.

It never ceases to amaze me that the solution to someone having low billables is for that person to somehow go find more work when, by definition, they are not the ones who know what work is available.

It is definitely one of those things that I feel like is so common in how our industry is organized that no one really seems to ask why. In another type of environment, in another organization, in other jobs, the idea that the people who are more junior and don't have access to the information about all the various things that are going on, that those people would somehow also be responsible for figuring out how to get work, as opposed to the people who are more senior, who literally know what works needs to be done and are responsible for handing out the work.

I think it is hard to explain to someone who is not a lawyer how it is that the people who are responsible for handing out work, for assigning work, for bringing junior lawyers onto their cases, how those people are not the people who are also responsible for making sure that the work is distributed properly.

You basically have this scenario where the people who don't have visibility into that are also being told that they're responsible for making sure that it happens, which is just bananas because the reality is that the people who are actually handing out the work are the ones who are the gatekeepers of who gets the work and who gets the billables.

Okay, so yeah, at this point, I'm just belaboring the point because I just think it's so transparently ridiculous that the solution to someone having low billables is like, “You should wander around and knock on people's doors,” as opposed to the people who have work should be handing out work.

Of course, the problem there becomes the reality that if there is not work to hand out, then in fact, there are not billables available and it is not because an associate is failing at getting billables, it's because the work is not there.

But that requires a level of responsibility to be taken by senior lawyers and law firms that structurally have been allowed to defer on to other people and that is a problem for many reasons, many of which we've talked about on this podcast before.

So yeah, the fiction that you should be wandering around and finding work in a context where you're not the one who actually knows what work is available is one of the many, many things about law firms and toxic law firm environments that I think create really problematic and damaging environments because transparently, if you have the people with less power being treated as those other ones with more power, yeah, it's not good, it's not good.

Okay, That is what I have to say about billables and associates being told to find work and all the reasons why I find it to be ridiculous. Thanks so much for joining me this week. I will talk to you next week.

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