Chapter 9: Roll dem Bones

[This chapter describes the more-or-less random way recent graduates find themselves working at big law firms.  The firm I joined wasn't nearly as big, or even a fraction as bad, as the ones described in this excerpt.  The really colossal firms are distinguished by firm cultures very similar to those of the old investment banks as described by Michael Lewis.]

In 1983 James B. Stewart published The Partners: Inside America's Most Powerful Law Firms, which explained with devastating clarity the pyramidal structure of the big law firms of the day. The main difference today is that the biggest firms are much bigger. As Stewart explained, a group of, say, 100 partners sit at the top of the pyramid, with 300 or more associates below them. The associates are paid a flat salary. The partners both draw a much larger salary and share profits. All of the associates are brought on board with the promise that if they work hard enough, they can become partners after seven or so years. But out of a cohort of 30 law school graduates hired in a given year, no more than one or two ever actually "make" partner. The rest are fired if they don't leave quietly. The partners let the associates know that their chance to make partner depends on how many hours they bill to clients, making "billable hours" a competition among the associates.

The billable hour is the defining feature of an associate's life at a big firm. A person who works a 40-hour week, with two weeks’ vacation and the equivalent of another two weeks in holidays (the United States recognizes ten federal holidays a year), will put in 1,920 hours at the job during the course of a year. Of course, it's not possible for any lawyer to bill every hour of the day to a client—there are firm meetings to attend, continuing education credits that must be accrued to keep one's license, bills to prepare, job-seekers to interview, extramarital affairs to conduct, and so on. All told, a lawyer who works a relatively normal workday at constant peak efficiency, without ever getting sick or going to the gym or having to take time off to deal with an injury or emergency, can hope to bill a maximum of about 1,800 hours per year.

Many of the biggest firms demand far in excess of 2,000 hours per year, sometimes as much as 2,400 hours—16 months of work per calendar year. There are only two ways for the associates to make quotas like that: (a) work insanely hard, and (b) defraud one's clients, for instance by "double-billing" (charging two clients for the same hours) or simply inflating the number of hours worked. There are many stories of lawyers billing more than 24 hours of their time in a single day

Most of the big law firms require their associates to do both (a) and (b). Naturally, only the first is talked about openly, although "bragged" is perhaps the better term. There are strong echoes of Marine Corps macho in the way big-firm lawyers talk about their days as associates. (One old-timer said to me, "After awhile, they start to believe they really worked that much.")  Those few associates who successfully climb over the corpses of their colleagues to the upper courses of the pyramid naturally feel they've earned the rewards of their superior merit, and since they had to go through it they can't see any reason for exempting the next generation of associates from the abuse.