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Subject Expert
Ehh. I don’t feel good about my initial response, which I deleted. I apologize to anyone else who saw it. Here’s the response your question deserved.
Any law firm requires a lot of non-revenue generating work to operate. Someone has to pay the bills, deal with the landlord, make sure the computers and copiers work, get the work, send the bills, collect the bills, hire, train, evaluate, and sometimes correct the staff and do a zillion other things to keep the trains running. The partners pay some non revenue generators to do that work, do a lot of it themselves, and delegate a little of it to associates as part of their job responsibilities. So, recruiting delegated to associates is a mandatory element of their jobs.
Some firms give associates credit for some or all of their their non revenue generating recruiting work for purposes of determining bonus eligibility. Some don’t. That’s within each firm’s discretion.
But even when firm policy lets you earn part of your way towards your bonus with non-revenue generating work, there is an often overlooked cost to doing so. That cost is called realization. Realization is the difference between the actual revenue collected for your work and the standard value of your work. Standard value is your rate multiplied by your billable hours. When you earn a bonus based on non revenue “billable” work, your realization is lower than it would be if all of your hours were revenue generating. Many (maybe most) firms monitor associate realization closely because it can be a sign of a high level of writeoffs or other problems.
If your ambition is to make bank for a few years and then become a travel writer, realization isn’t a problem. Do what you have to do to get the bonus. But if you want to be seen as a prospect for advancement it’s a bad idea to drive your realization down with lots of non-revenue “billable” work just to get a bonus. The more you’re paid the more the firm expects of you. That will never change.
Sorry again for the blustery first attempt.
Coach
Yeah, I got that. But at my firm many associates don’t make their bonus at all. I’ve never gotten the sense that just barely making it or making it non-client-billables is frowned upon.
I’m sure this varies across firms.
My firm doesn’t count recruiting, so starting midway through my second year, I did zero recruiting. that made it easier to hit my hours and I’ve gotten glowing reviews since.
We get up to 25 or 50 billable credit for recruiting and summer program efforts. It’s nice because I don’t necessarily feel like I need to “make up” the time spent at these events with more billables.
My old firm gave 0 credit for any kind of recruiting or summer programs. Very few people showed up to these kinds of events, and the ones that did only stayed maybe 30 minutes - 1 hour. The sentiment was, why would I spend this time out of my day, when now I’ll have to make up the billable hours later, maybe in the evening or a weekend.
Subject Expert
I get bonus credit (up to 50 (or maybe 100?) Hours of non-billable stuff (committees/recruitment/BD) count to my bonus and then a bunch more count towards extra bonus (30% more bonus @ 2200)
No but it’s tracked. Part of being a good firm citizen.