Can someone explain how a 300+ hour (or 350+, for that matter) month is possible? I’m not sure if my billing practices are dramatically different,, but I did a 250 month and literally felt like I was always working. HOW?

Averaging 250 a month comes out to 3000 hours a year. 200k after taxes and 401k is 150ish divide that by 3000 hours and you are at a whopping 60 ish bucks an hour. Moral of the story is the more you work the less you are worth. And that bonus doesn’t make up for it because it is taxed to the max and would probably only get you to 100 bucks an hour. Nothing.

Man some of you need to submit yourself to Guinness book of records given the longest recorded time without sleep was 11 days. Those of you saying you would get less than 2-3 hours/day for a month straight.

i even think 200 hour months are unbearable

Idk guys … I’m really questioning billing practices here. I’ve had weeks where all I have been doing is working from waking up to midnight and I was not even close to billing on pace for 300

"Fake time" and the like are lazy responses that say more about the commenter than the practice. It pisses me off as someone who has lived through huge months much more than I want.

I have had 225-hour months that felt like complete living hells, and, while rare, a couple 320-hour months that definitely sucked but weren't as bad as the 225-hour month. The 225-hour month I have in mind as the worst had tons of hellish videoconferences late into the night and in the morning, with projects involving both west coast clients and high-maintenance clients in Europe at the same time, with both demanding things on intense timeframes all day and night, and tons of other annoying clients, but the actual billable time not that much. That was horrible. The 320-hour month sucked but most of it was work I hate less like drafting and negotiating complex documents.

More generally, I find the big difference between a "normal" month of 170-180, or whatever your number is, and a 240-hour type of month is a lot of weekend work. It otherwise can be identical, but you start working in 8 more days per month of 6-8 hours, and you start getting big months quickly.

I’ve done it a couple of times for trial and the lead up to it. It’s absolutely brutal there’s no way to sugarcoat that. You spend every waking minute working. And you don’t get much sleep at all. You take all of your meals at your desk (that someone else made for you), and you cut corners on taking care of yourself. 0/10 would not recommend.

Idk. Ive done 220-230 and am a mom with small kids. For me, that means zero self care time / rarely showering / not sleeping enough / not doing any housework / pissing off my spouse / and feeling constantly stressed. Basically every waking second is working or mom-ing. Surely, someone without kids could find an extra 75-100 hours/month (and be completely miserable lol).

Corporate associates bill time waiting for comments. So it’s not always “working,” but it’s billable.

It’s also a matter of billing every second you work. Working 80 hour weeks is not unheard of, and if you can bill every second of it, it’s not impossible to get over 300. When you’re waiting for documents to come back and in limbo, then pick back up at 11pm it feels like you’re always working only to bill a portion of it.

Picture a 250-month except you're billing ~12.5 extra hours per week instead of sleeping. I've only billed 2 months in my 6-year career over 300 (each time just barely more than 300) and they were some of the darkest months of my life.

Bill everything. I bill every email im cc’d on as “attention to email correspondence”

I truly had a month just over 400 hours. I did not pad for a second, truly. I keep timers and was by the book. I also do not “bill time waiting for comments” like others have suggested.

I was on one deal in particular that month that was truly awful. We spent 12+ hrs a day on zoom negotiations, and then I had to go paper everything. I would go to bed around 4 am and wake up at 6, on average. My husband brought me food and took care of literally everything at home, including our child. So all I did was work, shower, and sleep.

It was awful. It’s not sustainable. 300+ hr months are not much better. It requires having someone help you care for yourself. In the case of my 400 hr month, it could only be done remotely (this was in 2021 full WFH era).

I think a lot of the people categorically claiming a 300+ hour month is fraud don't have practices that lend themselves to the types of hours that others do.

If you're on an active M&A team that's busy and top of that you're staffed on multiple matters, then I would say that a 300 hour month is not only possible, but inevitable at some point during your career.

Calls with clients, correspondence with clients, reviewing and updating ancillaries and the definitive docs, that in and of itself for one deal can easily entail anywhere from 3-12 hours a day, so having 2-5 active matters where you're consistently billing at least 4-5 hours isn't that much of a stretch from a volume perspective. Is it healthy or reasonable? Of course not. Is it something that should be glorified? Probably not.

But when you consider that it's an average of 10 hours per day, and you factor in the workload described above for 3-5 matters, then it's not even remotely beyond the imagination. And as others have mentioned, throw in 8 extra days of similar workloads on the weekends and then you really start to see that total number soar.

Did 275 in February (so like 300 had it been a normal length month). Truly wanted to cry/rage quit. I feel like it starts to hurt at 225+, but even a 190/200 hour month can suck depending on the distribution of hours. Like if you're slow the first half of the month and then bill 120 in the second half.

If you travel internationally a lot in a brief period or are in trial.

Trial. For me, all my 300+ months are during trials and the whole month I am either working or sleeping and nothing else.

I don’t think this would be possible with kids.

When I did it in corporate, I was working from 8 am - some time between 10 pm and midnight every night, and then doing another 15 hours or so on the weekends. When I’m that busy, I am pretty good at staying focused, and I’d eat meals at my desk and basically bill all day. The issue for me was that I basically spent all day on calls and fighting my inbox so I only could draft and do work from like 8-9:30 am and then 5 pm - midnight.

Insane amounts of pressure, adrenaline, and caffeine. I don’t want to do that again ever.

I’ve hit just under 400 (in the middle of a stretch of ~300 hour months) and it was basically the 250 month with less meals, showers, and sleep. Mainly sleep. I think there may have been a couple lighter days that month (was a December) but balanced out with a couple all-nighters.

Definitely not something to boast about - I think of it as a cautionary tale. As much as I blame partners for a lot of it, at some point I should have refused to work like that instead of going to absurd extremes to be “a team player.”

I've done it. It was not fun.