It's Tuesday at 5:45 pm. Having had the opportunity (theoretical, granted, but it was there) to have billed at least 20 hours so far this week, I have instead billed... 5. Five hours. I could maybe stretch it to six if I document every single letter that I mentioned to my secretary and she subsequently typed up (silly things like "Enclosed please find the signed Warrant to Satisfy"... bla bla -- but still -- that's at least a .1, right? I mean, I had to think about the file, remember its name, realize that it needed a warrant, walk over to my secretary's desk and tell her about the letter, and then review the letter for mistakes and then sign it ...that's TOTALLY six minutes!).
So the real question is -- how soon is it before they start taking iTunes off computers in the workplace?
The second question is -- exactly how bad is it to bill three hours a day??? granted, my firm has no billable hour minimum (at least not that I've ever been told about, but then again, I was never told about sick days and they exist, so...) However, I live in fear that at their super-secret-special-people meetings (I don't react well to being excluded for any reason), they bring all the associate billing sheets and scrutinize whether we're worth keeping or if we should be thrown to the wolves... I should really bring work home. But I am having a research-heavy week, which means two things: 1) I do actually spend a good six hours a day reading cases, statutes, a really old edition of Prosser (why did no one ever tell me that it's actually really funny? He mentions that this certain opinion by some state's Supreme Court has "never been regarded as making any sort of sense" -- hee!), etc., but feel ridiculous billing a total of 13 or 14 hours for just the research, not even the writing part of an assignment, and end up refusing to bill more than 3 hours a day on research (so, yeah, this whole rant is my own fault, hush!) and 2) I am so exhausted by the time I get home from slogging through complex analyses of coverage exclusions (which, don't get me wrong, I really am interested by, but there's only so many times you can pick apart the phrase "where benefit inures to the insured as defined by section a. and b. of that definition" before you want to start wailing).
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