How much does time/billing padding happen? Do partners/bosses turn a blind eye to the practice or actively discourage it?
Also, are associates/partners likely to participate in if your client expects 10 hours of work and you finish the work in 8 hours and surf the web for the 2 hours but bill 9 hours?
The ratio is closer to work 4 hours, surf net 5 hours, lunch 1 hour, bill 12 hours.
I’ve seen partners give their employees the benefit of the doubt that they are billing correctly.
IME as a biglaw paralegal, it can vary greatly depending on the attorney overseeing billing and the client. I’ve also worked on bankruptcy litigations where all time entries had to be submitted to the court, so those hours were often reduced and requires intense procedures.
I thought your question was a very interesting one, so I had Alison Monahan address it in a short article. I hope you like the answer she came up with. =)
http://thestudentappeal.com/op-ed/understanding-billable-hours
OP Here:
Thanks to EliHBCU and Alison Monahan. +2 eprops for u!
Thanks. =)
also, this article:
–LinkRemoved–
some of the comments after the article give other perspectives
No joke. Last summer one of the interns got the experience of pouring over an appointed counsel’s billing submissions to decide if they were appropriate or the judge should sanction him for padding.
.
The word “therapist” should never be used as part of a web address.
Seriously. I read that as “the peoples, the rapist” and had a small moment of confusion.
“As a psychiatrist, I was a professional twice over - an analyst and a therapist. The world’s first analrapist.”
best quote of the show
Yea, that’s what happened to me. The parallelism from “The people” doesn’t help their cause.
In the meantime, everyone should head over to penisland.net
They sell some really cool pens from Pen Island.
haha! I saw it as “the rapist” too!
I had to do that this summer. Some asshat PD was routinely billing over 24 hours a day. And he bragged to the local newspaper about how hard he worked.