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Don’t cut your own time. Partner calls you and takes your time away from other stuff? Bill the time it took (I’d say a 0.2 usually) and move on. It’s not your fault or your problem if that time gets cut. Bill it 100%.
I deal with the same thing. A partner at my firm has memory issues at his age and constantly asks me for updates on an email chain where the updates are visible on the forwarded emails. For example: “associate, have we done X yet?” And then you scroll down and the next email was from me telling him we already did X.
I update him again and I bill for the time.
This happens to me almost daily with one of our senior partners.
Rising Star
Assuming you can’t bill for internal calls. It’s just a matter of finding generic yet specific enough wording that won’t get cut. Try new words based on what is discussed. It’s trial and error.
Develop legal strategy re x issue
Develop updated discovery strategy
Develop litigation strategy through trial
Analyze x re x issue
Prepare for hearing/depo/mediation
Analyze recent settlement demand current resolution posture
You should just bill for what it actually is: "Telephone call from J. Doe re [whatever the call was about]"
And if it gets appealed over and over, it will be clear it's not your fault.
Rising Star
Yikes. This screams, micro-manager to me.
I had a partner that would swing by my office every 45 minutes to ask for an update. Annoying as hell.
I would ask the partner for advice on what the client would be less likely to push back on or if there’s a preferred way to bill those check in calls. If it’s just a 0.1 or 0.2, is there another entry for the same task that you could add it to? For example, my partner would probably just tell me to include that in the entry for doing the actual work we discussed over the phone.
I generally bill this as “confer with Boss on X”