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Please help me with the in hand salary
Additional Posts in Lawyers with ADHD
I’m not sure how this will impact this bowl, but it is worth pointing out the need to assess whether there should be concern for those in this bowl. While we all understand ADHD is something attorneys are completely capable of managing with legal positions, not everyone in the field agrees with that. https://joinfishbowl.com/post_va66ztgmkw
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I struggled with this for years and would feel so guilty despite working longer and harder than most. I switched jobs to a different type of role where it's not so much about numbers and I'm not being measured by document counts or the billable hour. Go in-house. Best decision I ever made. So much happier.
I do have a caseload that requires timely response and we do frequent meetings and reviews to prioritize assignments. I serve internal clients with 3rd party vendors, negotiate with external parties supporting sales and marketing on typical transactional agreements, and handle all litigation. There are several types of assignments, and as long as the work gets done on time, I'm good. So, I just create ways to track and prioritize.
Do you have enough work? If so, are you accurately capturing your time? I know everyone always says it but it’s so true that if you capture your time after every task, you’ll see your hours go up. Just leave your software program open all the time, no exceptions! Take a second after each task and enter it. Then, next task. Take it “piece by piece,” it will make your tasks and time entries so much more manageable and then you won’t feel overwhelmed having to look back and remember what you did.
Rising Star
Very common. It’s not your fault, you’re not a neurotypical, so the things that work for them don’t necessarily work for us. But you can get the same results by attacking the problem a different way.
What seems to be the issue with billing? Do you not have enough work? Are you cutting your own hours?
Can you give more context? How much are you billing daily on average?
Wanted to add: I struggled with this for a few years. one thing that worked for me was juggling 3 projects a day. I would one on one for an hour or so then switch to the next.
Enthusiast
I don’t get in trouble, but sometimes I feel I should. People leave me alone because I’ve had extremely high hours in the past for a sustained period of time, but for all of 2024 I’ve been slow. Part of it is a lack of work but the rest of it is honestly me. I just can’t even
Entering time daily, and/or starting draft entries to circle back to later in the day helps increase billables, trying to remember what you did two weeks ago is impossible. A couple of other factors may be that entries are written down by the responsible atty prior to creating the bill due to client billing guidelines, budget restrictions based on the billing codes used, or that the entry may have "restricted" words like research, voice-mail, email research (if standard allowed hours has been reached), etc, that will cause client reductions to be written off after submission. Many softwares have great tracking and reporting options to help monitor your hours throughout the month. Reach out to your billing staff for assistance on which reports you can run yourself, hope this helps.
You're probably under billing, not counting all of the moments you're planning for, developing strategy for, and thinking about a matter. Any intellectual effort you're putting into it should be captured, let the billing partner decide what to cut.