A partner at a firm is consistently billing 18-20 hour days...and I know for a fact he is not working that many hours everyday. How is he doing this? Is he billing unethically?

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One way to increase hours that I have seen is to bill .1 to every work email you get in a given day. Partners who get a lot of emails get a lot of extra hours.

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Unless he’s literally sleeping 4 hours a night, he’s stealing/cheating/being unprofessional/unethical.

You can only bill so much on cross-country travel days, M&A meetings that go into the night etc.

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Agreed

Short answer yes. Nobody is consistently working 18-20 hours a day. Firms turn a blind eye until they get called out by a client. Then it becomes a hunting expedition to find a person for their heads to roll. It’s hard to bill more than 8 hours a day without being extremely sloppy. Unfortunately lots of firms prefer higher hours with compromised work product than vice versa thereby encouraging such practices (again, until a ball is dropped).

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The only time this happens is if you’re on trial or closing a deal. It’s not only unethical it’s illegal.

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Well I know for a fact he’s not working those hours. There are days he will leave around noon to golf and he’s already billed 15 hours that day...and it’s only noon. This happens consistently. I just wasn’t sure if there was some “value billing” method he’s using that makes it ethical or at least in the grey area?

If he has an agreement with the client that X service costs X dollars, then value billing is ethical. But there's got to be an informed agreement.

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Curious to know how an associate knows what a partner is billing. If you have access to the time records you can see if he is making the same entries for multiple clients, which may suggest an improper practice.

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