Are any other paralegals struggling with billable hour requirements? I have 5 years of experience in corporate transactions, M&A, and real estate work, and have never had billable hour requirements. I'm in a new job now where I do and I'm nowhere near meeting them. I'm getting a lot more admin work than billable work, and it's stressing me out.

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I’ve been a paralegal for over 20 years and for most of those I’ve been in M&A and have never met a billable hour requirement if there was one. I get stressed out about it but there’s nothing I can do because it’s not like I don’t do my billable work. If anything, I do it too fast and efficiently. Admin work is part of my job unfortunately and I just explain that every year during my review. I let everyone know I am available and that is all I can do. My current job I just started about 7 weeks ago and was told they are easy going about the requirement but even being told that, I hate having to explain that I spent hours cleaning up invoices or whatever BS admin stuff I have to do.

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This. My first paralegal position was for a large firm that still used paper files and I was in Workers Comp defense. I'd touch 10-15 files a day! I can't bill for the time it takes to go get and put away files or the time it takes to find things in the file. I never hit the 6.8 billable average or whatever they tried to tell me I needed. Ya girls gotta pee too!

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Be fair but bill for the admin work — I’ll bet your firm has a code for admin work that you don’t want to bill for, but I suggest erring on the side of billing — it’s an art the way you word it :)

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Do you have an assistant? Use that person to do your admin. I was a senior transactional para for years and pushed a lot of stuff down.

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What is your billable requirement?

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