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Would be a huge red flag for me
Depends on the context of the comment. 200/ month was always my unofficial personal target when I was an associate. I have shared this view with my mentees.
It's not that you should finish with 2400 at year end. It's that sitting here today, you know you're not going to hit 200 every month. You're going to take vacation. Your practice is going to have some seasonal fluctuations (for lit, August and December will probably be slow; for other practices, it may be Q1). Even if your group is busy other months, you may have a slower month because a deal dies or a litigation settles and it takes a few weeks to get staffed up again.
To hit your year end target, you probably need a bunch of 200 hour months when you're busy to account for the 100-125 hour months you will probably have for the above reasons. If you plan to hit target by billing 165 hours every month, then you're going to come up short. If everyone else in your group makes hours because they bill the 200 months when work is available, you're going to stand out and people will notice.
On the flip side, if he is just telling you to bill 2400 hours a year, then he's probably a jerk.
Mentor
Agreed. Our minimum is 1900 with unlimited pro bono counting toward that and 50 hours of KM/other stuff that can count. I’ve been told by a partner that the expectation is for 1900 to be from purely billable and the other stuff on top. However, if you did 1800 billable and 50 pro bono and 50 KM, you’re still going to get a bonus and be considered in good standing. But that said, you need multiple months of 200+ to get to even 1800+ billable. I only billed 100 in August because everything died off or paused. I’ve also taken a couple 5 day-ish vacations. If I didn’t have a few 200+ hour months, I wouldn’t be hitting my 1900. As it stands though, I’m on track to probably end with right about 1900 billable and 150ish other stuff. So pretty much exactly where the partnership expects us to be.
My personal goal is to be at around 180 per month but I don’t tell people I’m too busy for more until around 200 (subject to context, e.g., hours required for the new work, etc).
Yeah, this is “no” from me. Most firms expect you to be over 2000, but having 2400 as a *minimum* is crazy.
The phrase “only billing 175” is absolute insanity. 175 is very busy.
You're going to get that at a lot of firms. Individual partners have expectations that differ from the firm's official policy.
Even so, any expectation of 2,400 hours for below-market comp is laughable.
Either try to work with other partners or plan to get out of there when a better opportunity arises.
Agreed with the above posts that it makes sense to aim for many ~200ish hour months (and assume a few slow/vacation/etc. months), so that it all shakes out to be a little bit above the hours requirement. But if the partner literally meant you shouldn’t have quieter months mixed in alongside 200-hour months, ignore that advice.
Also, with everything, context matters. There will be busy months and slow months, and even busier years and quieter years. For example, I’ve seen a talented and valued associate have a couple very busy years back-to-back and then partners were openly happy/supportive when she then had a quieter year and was right at the hours expectation — nobody thought she should have done more (even though the group was reasonably busy), and they wanted to ensure she wouldn’t burn out.
At some point, I would ask what your current department average is. If a partner is suggesting you should always have 200-hour months, I can't support that. But if associates are in a busy period generally and most in your department are billing that much, it's good to keep pace with them.
I think there are times it's ok to turn down new work at less than 200 hours a month, because taking on the new work could push you way past 200.
That said, it isn't a bad idea to try and extend yourself on your existing matters to get to 200 a month if you're hovering at maybe 175 or 180 right now.
As others have noted, defaulting to billing around 200 hours a month as a goal makes it very comfortable to hit hours at year end even taking into account slower months with travel, vacation, holidays, etc.