Drawing upon Robin Dahlberg's own experiences as a junior lawyer at a large corporate law firm, Billable Hours in 6-Minute Increments explores the obstacles facing women in the corporate workplace. With a sense of the absurd that Dahlberg only discovered in hindsight, she examines how women lawyers respond to the sexism, pressure to conform, tedium and stress that defined her daily life at the law firm and that continue to define the corporate work environment today.
If you have ever struggled with billing, found yourself at the end of a stressful, busy day, or week, with nothing on paper to show for it, you are going to learn to bill smarter, bill more efficiently and, more importantly, bill more ethically. You are going to reclaim your lost time. If you want to bill more--and we all do--this book is for you. If you are not capturing all of your billable tasks, you are losing time. If you are a law clerk, you are diminishing your likelihood for employment. If you are an associate, you are reducing your prospects for partnership. And, if you are a partner, you are not getting paid for all of the work you are performing. No matter what type of law you practice or the size of your firm, if you bill by the hour, these tips and techniques will help you learn to bill more efficiently, and spend less time documenting your time and reviewing your bills, leaving you more time to perform more billable tasks. You will also learn how to avoid block-billing, generic task entries, and task descriptions that do not meet client billing guidelines. With the second edition of The Billable Hour, you can bill more, easily and ethically, using time-tested manual timekeeping methods as well as timekeeping software new to the market. You just have to learn to document your time contemporaneously in a manner that meets client criteria. This guide will show you how. You are doing the work. I want to make sure you get paid for it.
The New Billable Hour is a practical guide for lawyers to gain control of their time, work, and life. In today’s demanding world, lawyers must learn how to increase productivity so that they can competently bill more hours, while still having a personal life. Lawyer and productivity consultant, Ritu Goswamy presents her unique system where lawyers learn: How to have more hours in the day to bill clients How to bill more hours in less time How to take back control of their time How to transform hours into wealth How to balance the priorities in their life Goswamy’s guide teaches lawyers how to bill more hours in less time by turning the traditional billable hour on its head. By following her steps and billing themselves one “new” billable hour per day, lawyers have more capacity to focus on their work, increase their billable time, and make more money.
The story-part memoir, part hard-hitting expose-of a first-year law associate negotiating the arduous path through a system designed to break those who enter it before it makes them. Landing a job at a prestigious L.A. law firm, complete with a six figure income, signaled the beginning of the good life for Ian Graham. But the harsh reality of life as an associate quickly became evident. The work was grueling and boring, the days were impossibly long, and Graham's sole purpose was to rack up billable hours. But when he took an unpaid pro bono case to escape the drudgery, Graham found the meaning in his work that he'd been looking for. As he worked to free Mario Rocha, a gifted young Latino who had been wrongly convicted at 16 and sentenced to life without parole, the shocking contrast between the greed and hypocrisy of law firm life and Mario's desperate struggle for freedom led Graham to look long and hard at his future as a corporate lawyer. Clear-eyed and moving, written with the drama and speed of a John Grisham novel and the personal appeal of Scott Turow's account of his law school years, Unbillable Hours is an arresting personal story with implications for all of us.
This practical book details the economic and client service advantages of alternative law firm billing methods, the various billing methods currently available and how to select and implement the right alernative billing method for law firms of all sizes.
A noble profession is facing its defining moment. From law schools to the prestigious firms that represent the pinnacle of a legal career, a crisis is unfolding. News headlines tell part of the story—the growing oversupply of new lawyers, widespread career dissatisfaction, and spectacular implosions of pre-eminent law firms. Yet eager hordes of bright young people continue to step over each other as they seek jobs with high rates of depression, life-consuming hours, and little assurance of financial stability. The Great Recession has only worsened these trends, but correction is possible and, now, imperative. In The Lawyer Bubble, Steven J. Harper reveals how a culture of short-term thinking has blinded some of the nation’s finest minds to the long-run implications of their actions. Law school deans have ceded independent judgment to flawed U.S. News & World Report rankings criteria in the quest to maximize immediate results. Senior partners in the nation’s large law firms have focused on current profits to enhance American Lawyer rankings and individual wealth at great cost to their institutions. Yet, wiser decisions—being honest about the legal job market, revisiting the financial incentives currently driving bad behavior, eliminating the billable hour model, and more—can take the profession to a better place. A devastating indictment of the greed, shortsightedness, and dishonesty that now permeate the legal profession, this insider account is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how things went so wrong and how the profession can right itself once again.
Billing is an essential aspect of running a successful law practice. It is how your law firm gets paid for its work, takes care of overhead bills, pays employees, and how you compensate yourself. If done incorrectly, your billing practices can threaten the very existence of your firm. Tracking and billing time to clients - whether it is hourly, flat fee, value or some hybrid thereof - is an important part of working in a law firm. Even in a contingency case you need to make sure your firm is reimbursed for costs. Too often over the years, I have heard the excuses from attorneys about why they have not done their billing. Usually, the excuse is "I am too busy - I will get to it when I can." Bluntly put, that is a poor excuse. If your firm is that busy, outsource your billing. The benefits of outsourcing your billing work and getting paid regularly will far outweigh the cost of outsourcing. My attorney/clients have a less than 5% AR. This book was written to help attorneys understand that billing needs to be a regular part of the process of handling a client's case. This will result in being timely paid for your work, and as I like to put it, "not get stuck holding the money bag". The billing guidelines will enable attorneys to bill their clients every 30 days, reconcile their trust accounts on a regular basis and keep the cash flow coming in on a regular basis.
Track billable time for your jobs and projects! Whether you work freelance, bill clients by the hour, perform contract work, or just need to account for your time, this logbook will keep you on target. Log daily work hours and project progress. 100 Hours Tracker pages with flexible format. 50 Project Tracker pages to note task breakdowns, key contacts, deadlines, and more Perfect for freelance workers, lawyers, programmers, contractors, writers, illustrators, designers, and anyone who tracks their hours. Keeping a clear central record simplifies invoicing, protects you in disputes, and helps you estimate project timelines. Measures 5-3/4 inches wide by 8-1/4 inches high. 160 pages. Hardcover with elastic band place holder.
