The Billable Hour Bustle

Those of us who work in the legal field are all too familiar with the billable hour. For big firms especially, your billable hours might spell the difference between advancement and stagnation. And because of this, attorneys push themselves long hours, in pursuit of the title of top biller. And for too many attorneys, this billable hour bustle has a negative impact on their mental health.

I believe that the core of why it is so negative is because it replaces our value as humans with our value from billable hours. Yet we are so much more than just our billable output.

I was fortunate that my previous job was salaried and set the billable hour limit at 2,000 hours a year, which comes out to normal 8 hour days. Yet even there, I felt pressured to make up billable hours whenever I had a family obligation that I couldn’t take a vacation day for earlier in the week. And since you can’t bill every second you are at work, the eight hour day often turned into a nine or ten hour day.

This pressure is much less than what attorneys at big firms feel, I know. Believe me, I’ve talked to colleagues who struggle much more than I did with the pressure of the billable hour bustle. I’ve seen the negative impacts it has had.

In an ideal world, the legal profession would value work life balance as much as it values the billable hour. As the LegalMind Society continues to work towards an ending the stigma surrounding mental illness in the legal profession, we recognize that part of that must be arguing for a billable hour system that values work-life balance over raw production.

Lawyers are not machines. And if you push them to act like machines, you will see the burnout that all too many lawyers know all too well. Perhaps someday, however, the billable hour bustle will be a thing of the past.