I’m the only associate with two partners in the firm. I’ve been here about a year and 8 months. It’s been my first job practicing law. I continue to run out of work, yet I’ve been given a billable requirement. It’s been very frustrating. After today I will be completely out of things to do again for the millionth time and will have to go ask for work again. I don’t think they have the caseload for me honestly. We just settled a huge case with multiple plaintiffs that was taking (continued below)

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…all my time and we only have 3-4 active cases where nothing is going on in them at the moment. I planned to move in 2-3 months and get another job but I don’t see how I can work here even that much longer. Again this has been my first job out of school so I don’t have a lot of experience. Any advice?

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It seems to be a “trend” these days and I think it’s absolutely ridiculous! I have worked for two firms in recent years with billable hour requirements and yet, not enough work. I assume that if a firm hires an attorney, they do so because there is a backlog of cases, or another attorney has left the office. Why then is there not enough work to fulfill billable hour requirements? That makes no sense, whatsoever. I’ve been a lawyer since 1987 so I am definitely not new at this.

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Get out. I had the same issue at my first job out of law school. The firm hired 5 attorneys aside from the founding partner but there was not enough work to go around. The partner still demanded we hit our hours. He’d also give us a busy work and expect new associates to find him clients while forcing us to stay in the office 9 hours a day. I left after a month because I wasn’t getting any real legal experience and saw no potential for person growth or firm growth.

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If you’re leaving anyway, just do your work and go home.

Do research and drafting for another attorney. Idk what the technical answer is, but if your name isn’t on the pleading and you don’t speak to the client, I don’t see why you would need it

Find another gig that you can do part time/remotely on your own schedule (ie think contract work) and when your full time bosses have nothing for you to do just spend your time at the office earning extra money on the side. There’s even groups on Reddit full of people who compete to see who can have the highest number of full/part time paying jobs at any one time. Just make sure you pay attention to your ethical obligations (ie conflicts checks etc), and be sure you aren’t utilizing any firm resources to do that extra work. Also, cover your ass by figuring out a way to document that you’ve asked your partners for more work and there isn’t any to go around.

Other options would be to take a bunch of CLEs that interest you to knock those requirements out; or research and write articles for random legal publications to boost your resume; or draft blog posts for non-competitors; etc.

As a partner myself, I’m jealous of you and miss the days where I didn’t have so much to do I wanted to pull my hair out.

That said, I also wouldn’t make any of my people just sit at the office for no reason either. That’s absurd.

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