1st yr question: do people ever bill the time while waiting for comments from supervisors/clients/counterparties (in the context of late nights and weekend fire drills)? If yes, what are the rules?

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Yes, if in the context of an immediate turnaround (i.e. draft is going back and forth multiple times that day). If you sent it and went to sleep, no.

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Associate 8, that’s the worst. Not billing billable time because the partner doesn’t want the hassle of writing it off means that it seems we had less billable work. It hurts us.

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Can’t tell you how many late nights I have had to just stay up all night, or very late, due to the deal signing premarket or otherwise meeting some artificial deadline. I don’t bill the 8 hours of sleep deprivation of just sitting there.

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I’d bill all of that. I’m a litigator and when I’m in court, I’m not doing something every single second. When I am waiting for the jury to come back from a recess and my mind is on my line of questions I’m not doing anything. You’re mind is still on the transaction. It should be billed. If you’re watching Netflix, different story.

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If you’re not rendering legal services, you can’t bill it.

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Billing policies vary drastically at different firms. There is no right answer other than to ask the appropriate people at YOUR firm.

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Agreed. Also worth asking senior/partners how they view billing

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This depends on the firm and the partner but there's almost always some other billable work you could be doing. Does it not strike you as cheeky to bill hundreds of dollars an hour as wait time, or hiding it in an entry? It should.

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It does. Then again, litigators get to do it all the time and no one bats an eye.

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Not if you're just waiting. I usually spend that time continuing to proof the document, so I still bill.

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Seems like a corporate question m, but I’ve sort of billed for some down time where I’m trying to file something. Idk though.

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For transactional work: If you can do something else while you are waiting you should do that instead of just billing to wait for comments. However if you don’t have anything else you can just pick up and have been told to wait for comments or docs need to be turned quickly, you should absolutely bill.

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Uhm tricky but I would just let the timer run, block bill and don’t add waiting time in the description. This should however be brought to the attention of the billing partner/associate. It’s sucks that we have to do it that way but then again our remuneration is based on billable hours and if someone is making me wait until 11pm to give me comments on something that that needs to go out ASAP I would want my stats to reflect that

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Case by case. Although my partner mentor mentioned that it’s usually easy to tell if someone is a “padder”.

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no, of course not, but if you have a low realization rate because you consistently bill more for a task than your peers would and it comes out when the bill is written down (either preemptively before or as an accommodation after the client complains to the billing partner), that is going to get noticed. i don't know if any statistical analysis is done or generally necessary at that point, but I'm just saying if you wanted to see with a relatively high degree of confidence if a consistent overbiller is merely inefficient, or is manipulating his time upwards, a lot of that can be reasonably confidently determined with trivial math.

Not in the litigation world

Curious what the time entry description would be if you do bill for waiting?

"padding my bill with bullshit because I think clients are paying me to exist at particular moments."

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Literally that’s the rule ^ bill when you are doing billable work. Really tired of seeing all these inflated bills like 7 hours attending to x... really 7 straight hours! I call BS

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