Earthshattering News: Layoffs Increase Likelihood Of Padding Timesheets |

You’re a young associate. Several of your friends have been "laid off" (most non-law firm types call it being fired). They are struggling with their loans, losing their apartments, having to move home. Then you look down at the assignment given to you by the one partner not hoarding the work to himself. You think to yourself, "I could probably get this done in a couple of hours." But then you remember you are short of meeting your hours targets. Is it surprising in this circumstance that associates "take a bit longer than they otherwise might" to complete the assignment? Hardly. What are firms doing to combat this pressure? Nothing. To the contrary, most firms encourage it.

It is one of the ironies of the short-sighted, leadership-less response to the economic crisis that firms responding by cutting staff and professional personnel are only exacerbating the behavior that helped feed the problem in the first place. But that is precisely what they are doing. In Bad Times May Bring Out Bad Behavior For Lawyers (sub. req.), Law 360 discusses this problem, with William G. Ross, a Professor at Stanford School of Law who specializes in billing ethics, concluding, "I think job pressure will inevitably increase billing pressure, which will encourage unethical billing."

The real problem goes far beyond unethical billing. It begins with work hoarding at more senior levels, extends to people doing their own typing when they don’t normally, continues to "checking cases in a few extra states just to make sure that the citation to black letter law is correct, carries on to the extra edit or two just to triple check there are no typos in the motion for extra time to file a brief, and so on. My point is that these incredibly smart lawyers can figure out ways to legitimately make more work for themselves without necessarily fictionalizing their efforts.

Who pays for this? The very clients challenged by the economy, whose reductions in work led the law firms to cut back on staff in the first place. Ironic that the end result may end up being higher bills (or at least higher write-offs for the firm). Efficiency is the first casualty of the billable hour system. The problem is the model, not the people. So, punchline for clients: if your firm is not changing its business model–dramatically–then watch your wallet.

http://www.lawbizblog.com Ed Poll

Two points: Senior lawyers will horde the work .. O.K. Yes, they will because they’re not rainmakers. If they continue to delegate work, they could seek new work and find new ways to help existing clients, both of which would provide new work/revenue for the firm. Hopefully, though, the clients would be better served by a senior lawyer doing the work faster, even if at a higher per hour rate.
Lawyers padding their time sheets … just because of the current economy? I think this is a slander/libel against the legal profession. Lawyers are as ethical (means also as unethical) as the rest of our society. No more, No less. Lawyers who would pad time sheets would do so in good times as well as bad times. There are a number of examples of time padding … which were in good economic times. I see no new evidence that this has been exacerbated because the economy has gone south.
And to say that there is a greater likelihood that it will occur because of the economy is to ascribe a low ethical standard to the legal profession. Just not true.
http://www.patrickjlamb.com Patrick Lamb

Ed, to deny that some people act worse when placed under greater pressure is to deny human nature. When work was plentiful, the incentive to pad was much less. Why pad when there was always more work available? People are faced with employment/unemployment prospects here. Maybe I am just too jaded to believe that everyone will act with angelic intent. I wish I believed you, I really do. It would certainly be a matter of professinal pride, but I gave up believing the profession was better than any other a long time ago.
http://www.duilawblog.com Dan Jaffe

I have long been a fan of flat fee billing because it eliminates the problem of padding all together.
I agree that the pressure of produce or perish may create the nexus that justifies “a little padding” in an associate’s mind. If you ever listen to a group of young associates blowing off steam in a bar you will undoubtedly hear that the temptation to pad is always there with the relentless pressure of the billable hour and the human rat races the business of law creates.
When faced with billing more hours or being next (or first) in line to get fired, most associated will secretly agree that the ends justifies the means. At least in larger firms, a good percentage of associates resent their clients and the partners and already feel taken advantage of by both. When they sense that the partners, who have already in their minds used them and worn them down, are ready to throw them under a bus in the name of the bottom line, they might feel they have it coming.
After all, it is the partners who have most or all of the client contact. The young associate labors in a purgatory of relative anonymity. They know that any perception by the client that the firm is squeezing them will reflect poorly on the firm as a whole, and is unlikely to hurt them much personally. If their job is on the chopping block anyways, they have nothing to lose.
Think an associate who is used to getting chewed at all ends wouldn’t mind sticking it to the partners and the clients? Sounds good in some alternative reality… but in the legal profession padding will be a fact of life so long as the billable hour lives on, and in tough times like these, many young lawyers see ethical transgressions like padding as a lesser evil than being laid off, losing their house and getting behind on student loans.