A lawyer died and arrived at the pearly gates. To his dismay, there were thousands of people ahead of him in line to see St. Peter. To his surprise, St. Peter left his desk at the gate and came down the long line to where the laywer was, and greeted him warmly. Then St. Peter and one of his assistants took the lawyer by the hands and guided him up to the front of the line, and into a comfortable chair by his desk. The lawyer said, “I don’t mind all this attention, but what makes me so special?”
St. Peter replied, “Well, I’ve added up all the hours for which you billed your clients, and by my calculation you must be about 193 years old!
On the topic of lawyers, a good friend is a solo practice lawyer. She says the general rule as a solo lawyer is that you generally can’t bill more than 20 hours of a 40hr week. The rest of the work time is marketing and business related. But that also means they need to charge enough to make those billable hours worth it. That said, there’s also currently a big push in her specialty to move to fixed billing to avoid many of the problems of billable hours.
Avery taught Mitch all about billing clients for his time. As an associate he could bill $100 an hour. His future progress at the firm, he was warned, depended on how much income he made for the firm. He learned that it was acceptable to bill clients more than he actually worked. 'If you think about a client while you're driving over to the office in the morning,' Avery told him, 'add on another hour.' He could bill clients for twelve hours a day, even if he never worked twelve hours a day. Mitch also learned that Avery liked to bend the firm's rules.
St. Peter replied, “Well, I’ve added up all the hours for which you billed your clients, and by my calculation you must be about 193 years old!