If you don’t make your billable hours requirement at your firm, are you ineligible for a bonus? It seems strange that if you bill 1899 hours, you get no bonus, but if you bill 1901 hours, you could get a bonus of 10% of your salary. Asking because I’m at 93% of my billable requirement.

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We don’t have a requirement. Always seemed silly to place requirements on associates who don’t control their own work.

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Yep. I have 1900 and I’m not going to get there despite multiple conversations with my practice group leader and other partner about lack of work. Terrified I’m going to get fired through no fault of my own due to poor management of associates and COVID. It sucks.

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If you are foolish enough to miss it by an hour you definitely don't deserve the bonus!

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Yep. Missed it by ten hours once.

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It is a factor but not the only factor. That having been said, nobody should ever miss by 1 hour.

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I missed it once by a little bit. If I had hired myself to do the extra hours I would have made the bonus that would have easily covered the fees to hire myself for that work.

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Yep

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I think it depends on the firm. They used to round us up without a clear rule until one year they decided they round up if you’re less than 10 hrs away and prorate you if you have good reviews and are within 100 hours from your goal.

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It depends on the year, but generally yes.

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In many places, yes. It’s a minimum. You hit it or you don’t.

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Yes

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Last year, I missed by about 40 hours and they still gave me a discrecional bonus. I was told not to tell because others with similar hours weren’t going to get one. I think it depends on how far off you are and if anything happened during the year that would have impacted hour hours.

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Do you think Covid impacted or will impact discretional bonuses in general? I was told I should get a discretionary bonus because I was so close but around bonus time decisions we were knee deep in Covid.

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My last firm drew a bright line, with the thought that anyone close should figure out a way to get the hours (pro bono counted as billable). My current firm pro rates the bonus into four tranches, including a premium for exceeding the 2000 goal by 10%.

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I mean you have to have some kind of metric...you can’t just expect a bonus because you got “close”

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Completely agree with Counsel 1. It is a shame that efficiency isn't valued as much as the number of hours billed, even when it's better work product.

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Wait, what firm gives bonuses at 1900 hours? 👀Help a fellow attorney out

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We do! We compensate on 1/3 of collected revenue (considering write ups and write downs). I only bill about 110 per month and let’s just say, I get nice bonuses. My collection rate is 90%.

At one firm I was at years ago in order to qualify for a bonus you were required to bill 2050 hours. I was pregnant this year and worked my butt of and billed exactly 2050 only to be told by the head of the litigation department that I needed to bill “in excess” of 2050 (meaning another 6 minutes) in order to qualify. I was SPEECHLESS!! Fortunately I was able to point to a few hours of work I had done for a partner that he wrote off and convinced the firm I should be considered to have qualified. So yes - one hour (or even less) really can mean the difference between a bonus and no bonus. Good luck!!

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Not at my firm, it’s a factor that weighs against a bonus, but not a disqualifier.

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No - we care about collected, not billable.

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What I also don’t like about cheap firms like this is the sword only cuts one way. If they don’t collect on a bill, you don’t get credit. But if you do a fixed fee project where you collect 2x billable because you were efficient, they won’t give you credit for that.

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At my v25 firm you’ll still get a bonus just of a reduced value/amount. Even if you are not in good standing

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My firm awards bonuses primarily on net margin, which is calculated by taking money in the door minus cost (salary, benefits, overhead). In theory, you should have a positive net margin before you hit your billable expectancy, so you could get a bonus without hitting 1800, but it usually doesn’t work out that way unless you are billing significant time above your standard rate. Overhead calculation is opaque and appears to be fluid which also it’s not helpful. 2 cycles ago I had a positive net margin but did not meet expectancies due to mat leave and I did not get a bonus.

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I imagine a sharp cut-off for bonuses encourages bill-padding near the end of the year. If a motion took eight hours to draft, but you need ten more hours to get a $10,000 bonus...

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Basing comp on hours billed generally discourages efficiency unless the firm is overflowing with work. I can tell you I don’t have a single client that likes to see a single lawyer billing a hundred plus hours per month to their matter, unless we’re in pretrial or trial.

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