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Dang, sorry I meant to comment on the post!
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Rising Star
Rising Star
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Rising Star
lol wth
This is a wild approach to our profession. Lol
Wild that some firms want 2200 minimum+ but don’t pay market or will never give atty’s equity
I’ve done both litigation and transactional support work and spent my first few years trying my best to game the system, so here are some insights:
1. Litigation groups have the most opportunities for easy billing and long assignments. Drafting motions, and responding to discovery can take up large chunks of time and going to hearings can too. However, most litigation clients require the time to be kept in .1s and have dropdown-style billing guidelines that are reviewed. So while the work can be easy to rack up billing, inputting it is the biggest pain in litigation. There is also a firehose of work in every litigation group at every firm I’ve known of.
2. Transactional work, especially speciality groups, can be harder because you have to use more brainpower due to less “defend deposition” style tasks and constantly switching tasks can be hard. There aren’t many opportunities for an 8 hours (respond to discovery) type entry. But many of these groups can have clients that allow .25 billing, so you can rack up 8 hours pretty easily if you have 4 clients in a day and spend right under 2 hours on each one. They also might not have their own clients, unless it’s a Corporate or M&A group, which I do not have experience with.
There are two caveats that I will give you which I learned while trying to game this system. First, every law firm has the same profit incentive, which is to have you bill as many hours as possible because every minute you are not billing is a dollar the firm is losing. And second, if you do not enjoy the work you do, you will not succeed in a law firm. The level of detail and time-consuming learning can be painful if you are not interested in what you are doing. The best advice I ever got was prioritize doing good work. I was not successful in the firm model but I prioritized learning so when I went in-house, I was able to bring a lot of those skills with me and succeed here.
This is not true for Big Law. Transactional associates have a way easier time billing than their litigation peers. First, transactional lawyers work on less matters than the average litigation associate becuase transactional matters have less down time and don’t tend to go on as long. Second, deal work is much less fee sensitive than litigation work. In most deals the lawyer fees are a fraction of the total costs and typically less than the other advisors. In high end corporate work, no one is challenging bills so as long as the deal gets closed. For deal work, a lot of time the detailed bills aren’t even provided and the lawyers get a wire as part of the funds flow at closing. As a result, transactional associates can block bill. At most big firms transactional lawyers tend to bill more hours, command higher rates than litigators, and have less of their time written off which results in higher margins as compared to litigators. The above is true for corporate deal lawyers in m&a, finance, capm, funds etc. It may be less true of specialists like tax lawyers who work on a ton of different matters at once. That said no one is challenging the time a tax specialist bills to $1M bill for an m&a or financing.
OP - this ask doesn’t make sense. Billing is part of all practice areas at most law firms
I think they want to know the busiest practice groups, ie practice groups with the most work. @OP, might depend on the strength of the practice group, reputation, etc.
Anyone correct me if I'm wrong (or if there are nuances to this) but I think you'd want to target practices where you can be in a lot of meetings, depos etc. When I worked at an ID firm, I thought my colleagues had it easy in terms of making their hours compared to me (corporate). They often said it too. They could sit in 5 hour long meetings and not say a word and that's 5 hours of billable time. Of course, it's going to be a give and take.
Yes, this is the kind of response I am looking for! If anyone further can point me in the right direction or know whether one practice group is better than others (personal injury, HOA work) in terms of easy billing, I’d love to know!
In Biglaw, I think M&A has it pretty good in terms of billing (plenty of bad parts to M&A obviously). 16 hours to “Due diligence review.”
Are you asking what practice group has the most hours that are billable to the client that don't require deep work (so ones that have the most depositions that you defend?)? Or that have the most opportunities for a junior associate to pick up billable hours? Or that have billable that come it larger chunks, so you only have to put in 16 entries instead of 70? What do you mean by "easiest practice in terms of billing"? (Almost always, my answer is going to be government work, with second place changing based on definitions.
I was a tax lawyer in Big Law. I can’t speak to transactional practice groups, but we had time cut on our own matters or non-deal work.