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Hi fellow fishies!
Can someone please explain what is “SUPPLEMENTARY allowance” in my payslip??? It is the highest in my entire payslip, more than basic salary. Basic is lets say ₹7 lac annually and supplementary bonus is ₹7 lac 40 thousand.
Can someone please explain why this exists in my paylslip, is it good or bad from tax perspective and shall I ask my HR to decrease it???
Please help asap.
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I use timers religiously. I found my billables increased 5-10% just from tracking my time like a hawk rather than trying to ballpark it after the fact. You don’t have to pad your hours to get there, just quit giving away time.
This. Doing this right here helped me a lot.
I track my time w a notepad as I'm working (and try to avoid having to guesstimate after the fact). I would NEVER intentionally inflate my hours.
The incentive to do this is one of the most pernicious and least talked about consequences of pressure to meet and reasonable hours expectations.  To anyone who does or is considering doing this, please stop. Your reputation and self-respect are the most important things you have in your personal and professional lives. Both are gravely at risk whenever you stare down this path.
Hundred percent agree. And we all agree that billing for time we know we weren’t working is wrong.
Many people do it. You shouldn't.
But yes, if you are an unethical shithead, doesn't take much to realize that if you add 10% to every time entry, you'll have a much easier time hitting target hours.
... he hits target is by adding time to tasks that he is highly efficient at (we are both 7 year calls) and adding time when drafting documents that he finds a perfect precedent for. He says this is widespread and one of those things everyone does but no one talks about. Is this really the case? I would hate to think that my very honestly tracked billables are being compared to those of people who are inflating their hours. :-/
Also OP thank you for opening this discussion.
I do not want to hijack someone else’s thread, but would also like to know how prevalent “wrapping in” hours is. Example: An attorney does 4 hours worth of research for a memo to an insurance client about some legal problem. No insurance company is going to pay for that, so during the drafting portion the attorney “wraps in” his research time to the drafting of the document by adding an additional 4 hours to what it actually took to draft the memo. Clarification: I was told people do this, but I find it . . . Uncomfortable to say the least.
One other important point I'll note: There are some instances in which bills can become discoverable to the detriment of the client. You want to put enough detail so that the work looks reasonable, but you want to avoid including sensitive or confidential information. For example "researched [X detalle description of client's arguable malfeasance]" is a dangerous entry in the hands of a plaintiff or enforcement agency. Even if it doesn't tell them that the client did something wrong, it still sets up a red flag that they can look into. It's actually quite difficult to say that you researched something without giving a possible future reader any hints about mistakes that the client has arguably made. Sometimes the best strategy is to keep billing entries short and vague.
Never heard of anyone doing this in 15 years in biglaw.
Seems to me it’s the same thing. If you agree to handle cases under a set of specific billing guidelines that exclude work you know will be needed, and then label your work inaccurately so you get paid for incompensible work, that’s also cheating and stealing.
I am glad your compass detected it. There’s a famous bill padding case involving a prominent former NY lawyer named Harvey Myerson, who served a prison sentence for over billing one of his clients. Three or four of his former colleagues were prosecuted and as I understand it their testimony was basically that Myerson mentored and trained them and they were convinced that what they were doing was wrong. Unfortunately a fair number of lawyers are either in that boat or are so focused on the short term objective of hitting their hours target by any means necessary that they lose their ethical bearings.
I have never heard of any of my peers doing this in Biglaw for 7 years and never in my 2 yrs at a regional firm...I don't want to be naive, but I don't think this is as pervasive as your friend suggests. Maybe it is at his or her firm? But I haven't encountered it at all.
I think this is a pervasive issue that none of us talk about.
It can take the form of the negligent biller that waits until the end of the month to enter their time (although that reports in under reporting as well) to the far more egregious case of malicious over billing.
One particular instance I see on large transactional matters is senior partners billing for calls that they either didn’t join or didn’t need to be on and didn’t participate in.
Wow that's absurd that's going on.
So I agree that deliberately padding hours to account for efficiency is a dumb idea and is bound to land you in some trouble. However, when you round your hours to the nearest tenth or quarter hour, are you not (to some degree) padding? A tenth here or a quarter there may not be much at once, but it adds up...
Personally I use timers, but I still run into the rounding issue. Generally I’ll round down if it’s close, but if it’s in the middle I’ll round up (side note, 95% of our clients are billed by the quarter hour, so there’s much more gray room in between than there is with tenths of an hour). I’m available and answering emails literally 24/7, but if I’m not in the office I’m usually not billing for answering those emails. Accordingly, I justify rounding up to account for those hours I spend responding but not billing.
Does that make me unethical?
Thanks A5, not a bad idea. If the firm has a policy that’s that specific, I’m not aware of it.
Can’t we just got to fixed fee services so we can stop keeping track of hours? Literally the worst part of this job to me. Such a pain in the ass
I think there’s a generational issue here. I’ve seen older attorneys spend an hour manipulating a document (sometimes with the help of a secretary over their shoulder) doing work that I know younger attorneys can do in 10 minutes or less. I don’t pad time, but I also never hit billable targets because I can’t figure out how to make practice of law take that long. 
I agree that I shouldn’t do it and I have no intention of doing it. To me it’s the equivalent of stealing. I am trying to understand how widespread it is and whether my entire career in biglaw will be negatively affected by having my hours compared to those of lawyers who are engaging in this practice. My friend at the other firm seemed very surprised that I don’t do this and was basically laughing at me and saying I was naive if I thought that you are only supposed to bill the actual time spent on any given file. It’s very demoralizing.
No need for apologies - I did not feel singled out but rather just wanted to clarify that my original post was intended to understand the pervasiveness of this issue, and not to suggest that this was something I was considering doing. I have always been aware that some unscrupulous lawyers do this but I guess I was hoping to get confirmation from our colleagues on here that it is the exception rather than the rule. I am relieved to see that so far, that seems to be the case, and hopefully not as a result of self selection bias. I think what threw me off is that the friend that told me this is a close friend (I have known them for 15+ years) and someone that I would have otherwise considered to be an ethical person.
Seems like this practice is likely to be hugely under reported because no one would admit to it. Also very difficult to catch, I mean my firm and I assume most firms’ systems keep track of when you go in and out of each document so I guess you could build a forensic case if it ever came up...but honestly come on no one is going to do that absent a lawsuit specifically raising the issue. And how would that happen.
But what if you're reading a binder at home? I don't pad my hours but sometimes I do get paranoid that people think I'm not working if I'm not creating a digital trail.