Can I bill for this?

(upbeat music) - Welcome to Bar Review, a space where we talk honestly about life and the legal profession. I'm Carrie, and I'm Anika. Welcome to the conversation. Just a quick note before we get started, we are not your lawyers, and this is not legal advice. - And to the extent either of us are employed by the time this airs, this is where we share our personal opinions and not the opinions of anyone else, especially those kind enough to employ us. - And one more time for the people in the back? - We are not your lawyers. This is not legal advice. Thank you for listening. - We've gotten our first question. - We have. - And it is about the billable hour. - And I also have some news. - Let's start with your news. - I'm gonna go out on my own and hang a shingle and have my own little last shop starting in 2026. - I was gonna say, oh, that means you're free of the billable hour, but you kind of aren't. - Well, but that's the chat, right? Right now I'm thinking through the structure of what that's gonna be and this thing that I'm gonna build and am I? Am I free of the billable hour? - In a certain respect, I actually think in the way that the billable hour grates on my soul, you will be free of. - Tell me about the billable hour and tell me what it grates on your soul. - Well, just sort of what is the billable hour? So lawyers get paid for their time. So your clients are paying you for the time that you spend on their case. And that makes total sense. What I didn't fully appreciate is how lawyers track said time. So that comes down to the billable hour and I think pretty much universally, although I'm sure there are solo practitioners, maybe you will be one. But pretty universally, people bill by six minute increments. - Which is 0.1 of an hour. - So one tenth of an hour. I've seen a 15 minute increment. - I have seen that, but I've seen it a lot less than the six minute just 'cause our time is really expensive. - Yes. - And so what does an increment mean? It means if I draft you an email about something, and it takes me four minutes to write that email, that is a 0.1. So that's within a six minute window, so that becomes 0.1 billable hour. But then let's say I'm writing a motion and I'm doing a lot of research one morning and that takes me three and a half hours. Then that gets billed as 3.5 or three and a half hours of my time and your hourly rate is adjusted accordingly. If someone's hourly rate is $300 an hour, if you send an email in 0.1, that client is paying $30 for that 0.1 of you sending an email. Which again makes a lot of logical sense. All of this makes sense. - What that has translated into for me in my life is that I can tell you almost perfectly metronome style. What about six minutes of our conversation has gone by. - I am so internalized on what six minutes are at this point. - In a way that's painful. - Yeah, I remember hanging out with one of my friends. After we'd been in practice, I need to be with an impractical year or something. It's like a year of the billable hour and we were joking that we could know, like we'll be doing a task at home, like loading the dishwasher and you're like, I was a 0.3. - And you know it. - And you know it. (laughs) - In my gut, I know that I've done a 0.3. - I know it. I mean, we should time it to make sure I'm right, but I know it's 0.3. Like I know it in how long I've been in the shower. I know it in how long I, you know, insert social activity here where I'm supposed to lose track of time. You know, it's really painful internalizing, living your life in six minute increments. You get really good at it after doing this for a while. And one of the things that I really didn't understand or have the context to understand as a law student is when you're looking at legal jobs, those job postings will have a billable hour requirement attached to them. And those numbers can vary widely. Some will say 1,600 hours and those are annual billable expectations. So in a year, you're expected to build this many hours. So I've seen 1,600, I've seen 1,800, I've seen 2,200, they're heavily market dependent. 2,400 recently I'm starting to see. Yeah, especially in markets like New York City or San Francisco or Chicago, they tend to have higher billable hour expectations and your salaries grow according to your billable target. Generally when we're talking about big law, the higher your billable expectation, the higher your salary. Well, in bonuses are involved in that too. Right, so if you bill over your annual expectation, say your annual expectation was 2100 hours and you ended up building 2,400 in a year, there's some type of bonus math that kicks in for those 300 hours usually. And it firms you differently and usually it's a little black box, but maybe every 50 hours you bill, every 100 hours you bill, over your minimum requirement, you get some type of bonus that attaches to that. Just to be clear, what is a black box? Yeah, great question. A black box just means no one knows. So it's the firm holds it close to the chest. The partnership knows but you as an associate don't know. Yes, and I'm actually not sure in all instances that the whole partnership knows, sometimes bonuses and those types of metrics are decided by committees within the partnership but a smaller group. So it might not even be something that's universally understood in a law firm. In fact, there are black boxed partnerships where you are a partner in the law firm and don't know what another partner in the law firm really makes. I've worked in an environment where it was black boxer on salary. We live in a state that has outlawed that. So that was an interesting dynamic too where the law firm was a national and international law firm with a lot of different offices and a lot of different places. And that's the policy of the law firm. But it conflicts with local law. So I mean, I make it a point to always talk honestly about the billboard and what I'm being paid because secrecy serves no one. Actually, it serves someone. There's someone. It's certainly not you. It's not you. But so the really big thing that I didn't understand when I was even starting as an associate, like I've signed on the dotted line and I've committed myself to this environment where I have a billboard or expectation. What does that actually mean for your day-to-day life? And so let's say your billboard expectation is 1,800 hours. If you do the math, if you're like, oh, I'm going to work whatever, 52 weeks in a year, I'm going to set aside a little bit of time. We should not be working 52 weeks in a year. You should not. You should have at least holidays off and you should also take some time off. So let's say you take six weeks off. Actually, I'm going to do this math. So we get it right. I'm going to pull out the calculator. I would say a lot of law firms encourage a certain amount of vacation. And then other law firms have a quote unquote no vacation policy, which I think it does not actually serve an associate. Because the law does not have paid time off. It has out of office abilities. So you can take time out of office that does not mean you get credit towards your billable hour expectation when you're out of that office. You just get to go be somewhere else for a week and not bill. But you get the pleasure of billing those hours at a different point in the year. So let's say we have 52 weeks in a year. Let's go with a 1,900 hour billable requirement. It's a good one. Yeah, that tends to be what I've seen. But let's say you take six weeks not working. So that includes holidays, doctors appointments, a couple of vacations, which we hope you should take. So that means you're going to work about 46 weeks in a year. So if you are supposed to bill 1,900 hours in a year, divided by 46 weeks, that means you should bill 41.3 hours in a week, which sounds like if we talk about a 40 hour work week and now we're talking about billing 41 hours in a work week, that sounds on paper about right. But I think what doesn't get talked about a lot is that for me to bill a six hour day, I worked eight hours. Correct. I would say in efficient eight hours. A very efficient eight hours. And I took care of myself in those eight hours. So I went and had a workout. I ate lunch that day. I took a couple of coffee breaks. I went to the bathroom. And I can know, especially in very high competitive work environments, I knew a female attorney who I deeply respect and think that she is just a goddess of a badass. And she had a calendar blocks to remind herself to go to the bathroom. Otherwise, her day would just flow away from her. I could never. I just-- I don't know. I drink too much water. I probably have to limit my. I'd get like one large water bottle a day and that's just the limit of my intake so that I could Bill more hours, but that is the part that I did not understand when I was a lost student and a young attorney was that I sat there and I did the mess and I was like, oh, okay, a 40 hour work week. I can do that But you don't realize that yeah every time you get up to go to the bathroom or get a cup of coffee or go get lunch or Mingle your clock isn't running those are not point ones your Half hour lunch break is not a point five even your hour Luncheon that you go to for the bar association is not an hour you get to bill I do just want to say that you should bill for the lunch we went to yesterday because you got CLE credit for being there Well, yes, well, that's another so there's different types of billable hours that exist and some of them matter differently than others So you should record every single hour that you put into your job if you are doing a Marketing event if you're doing CLEs if you're doing any type of Professional development if you're in a firm internal committee you should be recording all those hours because It shows time that you're contributing that isn't a client billable hour you are developing yourself into the lawyer that you need to be and at the end of the day this really is a craft and if you are working on your craft you should be quote-unquote Billing those hours But the code you'll be billing it to what is essentially an administrative time code Yeah, so you'll you'll work in some type of Billing software and Cleo is a big one Adorant is another big company There's there's all these different software is that all functionally do the same thing they are a database of codes that are assigned to either active cases or Marketing opportunities or whatever the the Object I think what you're doing is and then quite literal timers that you run or that you input and then you write a Description of what you did for that hour and that is submitting a time entry so that's how you record all of your point ones but the Kicker to this whole situation is that in I think every private law firm pretty much the important hours are the client billable hours and That makes sense. That is how the business makes money and at the end of the day if you elect to be part of a private law firm you are electing to be part of a small business of varying size so If you work in a law firm with 11 lawyers That's an obviously a smaller business than if you work in a law firm with 900 lawyers, but the way that That business makes money is sending a bill to clients to pay for your time So when your billable expectation is 1900 in the year Generally what that means is 1900 client facing hours and there are some allowances so Oftentimes firms will give billable hour credit for Pro bono work, but usually only up to a certain threshold and I've seen that threshold range from 50 to 100 hours and I want to just say to you 50 hours is truly nothing Just to give some content like one deposition is eight hours just to take it and probably another Six to eight hours to prepare for it if you're efficient and quick and it's not a big Yeah, deposition and so you know that's 20 hours on one task that doesn't include preparing your client Typically somebody who may never have been deposed before who's never testified before that takes time that should take More than one session in a criminal case in the most straightforward Criminal case where you really should be reviewing absolutely everything that you receive from the government because somebody's liberty is at stake one very short scenario could involve body-worn camera footage of a myriad of officers Every single person who was arrested is likely to get put into a different squad car Which means then you get squad footage you should watch that squad footage because you never know what the front Camera caught on something else so you end up who develop tricks and tips as it goes, but I think it's worth keeping in mind How long things take for purposes of when you you're going through different interview process to hear there's a 50 hour cap on Pro bono you should know that that means you might depending on the culture get in quote-unquote trouble For zealously representing your client in a matter that exceeds that 50 hour threshold even if that case Requires significantly more hours than 50 hours and even if you're not in Trouble and in some way you are going to have to eat those hours so to speak so if you spend 50 more hours over your cap on that case They might not give you credit for those extra 50 hours and so you just that doesn't go towards your 1900 That just exists in the ether of work. You've done that doesn't count towards your billable requirement I was actively told in a review that I was doing too much pro bono and I did And this was not in an environment where there was a pro bono cap and theory all of it I was told Went toward my seam requirement, but it gets pulled out on the spreadsheets and have for the review But I the literal words that were said by my reviewer were Pro bono is something that you can do instead of riding bikes or going for a run It's not instead of working on billable client matters not environment I thrived in and To be fair. I mean that I do understand that perspective because this is a business and Something that I also didn't really appreciate about law firm businesses is that lawyers Bring the money in but they bring the money in for everything so Your legal assistance their salary comes out of the hours that lawyer is bill your professional responsibility insurance your CLE reimbursements everything that the firm is putting money out towards lights the furniture The plants in your office like everything comes out of billable work that some attorney is doing and to be Very blunt and honest and associates value to a firm is the amount of hours that you can turn out especially a newer associate That's still learning Which also what that means for somebody who's just starting out and we can both speak to this is that You're going to do a lot of small projects on a lot of different cases and you will lose quote-unquote time As you transition from one case to another case So for example if you're working on a brief all day for one case You might bill Somewhere between six and nine hours on one matter because you just put your head down and you focused on that one thing That's more likely to happen as you Have been in practice for longer in that type of environment what You might experience in a typical day as a first year associate in a big law firm is that you touch 15 cases You shouldn't I'm saying 15 because Anika is the kind of woman who would touch 15 cases In a day and my advice to Anika when she was going through that stage in her career that I don't take myself is that there should be a separate clock running That you are just keeping track of your whole day and then you subtract from that all of the available work that you did That you kept track of throughout the day so that whatever you're left with which is your lost time That's admin time that you've spent Transitioning from one matter to another matter Yeah, and I so I did have a practice experience where I was working on many different cases regularly And I now have a practice where I work on much fewer cases within a day so of four or five case day is a busy day for me now and that's a much different billing experience It feels easier like you said to hit that six or seven or eight hour threshold When you're just getting really into one project and one of the big differences is I'm doing a lot more drafting of longer More extensive pieces of writing and and that's a huge way to build a lot of hours Document review which I'm sure is something we'll talk about is a way To get a lot of hours at one time starting up a project can take a lot of time that transition Time both literally in opening up the right files and finding the right emails and also mentally to sit to yourself and think okay What is this case? What do I need to do? How do I approach this problem? Can be difficult and you lose time in that process where when you're just writing all day you can Turn off that timer and go get a cup of coffee and you're kind of still In it and then you come back and you dive right back into that issue instead of having to Rethink through what do I need to turn to because even thinking through the priority of what comes next if I have 12 things sitting in my inbox and then you do have to take A point one to figure out which one is the most important that I turned to and so you tend to lose a lot of time and I think when I was A newer attorney for sure. I did have that experience of I am working all the time and people can see that I'm working all the time and I'm always busy and I don't say no to work and why do my billable time sheets not seem to reflect that. And as a young attorney I had no context so I was like, "Look, I'm I'm billing the work that I'm doing. I'm putting everything on paper. I don't know what you want for me." Like I rounded all down. But what I over time really came to see that I was missing is a lot of those.1s and I think something that's hard when you're newer is really billing for everything. You read an email on that case that's a.1. You send a quick response to say, received thanks that's a.1. I'm on it. 1 because you touched that case and is that something that clients probably hate? I'm sure. If I was on the receiving end of some of these legal bills I'd probably be like, "What do you mean? I paid $30 for someone responding to an email." But at the same time that is what this profession is and that's my time. And so. And there's value in it too, right? Because what you've just communicated to a partner who's billing at $900 an hour is this no longer needs to sit on your brain. On some level that is the business. The client hired you. The client signed an engagement letter. The client understands what your rate is as they sign your engagement letter. I do think sometimes associates can feel guilty about that because this is more money than you've ever seen before. It's more money than I'd ever seen before. And I don't feel worthy, which Monica doesn't struggle with. I struggled with. Oh no. I definitely struggled with that. When it comes to bill, I still struggle with that. Even every day I still do things where I should record that as a plain one. And I just don't. But the problem is it matters. And if you think about it, if you do three, four things every day that are point ones that you don't record, that's two hours a week. And when you're looking at the end of the week and you've built 38 hours on a case and you know you need to be hitting 40, those point ones matter. And you should know that everybody else is keeping track of their time that way. So you won't get your bonus. You won't get acknowledged for the work that you're doing and for the effort that you're putting in because you haven't literally reflected what you yourself are sacrificing all the other things that you're not doing in your day because you are working. And you should make clear to the powers that be. They can always write off your time that this is how you spend your time. And that's what I say when I talk about is this concept of writing off usually. There's a there's a billing attorney on every case. I think it's a pretty uniform term. And that's the attorney that quite literally reviews the bill and sends it off to the client and usually has the client relationship. And so they're the ones asking them for money. And they will sit down every month and review the bill and they will make judgment calls for writing off time, which literally means they're discounting it or deleting it from the bill. And there's different ways to do that. Sometimes it's just fully removed from the bill and the client never knows that time was spent on their case. Sometimes it stays on the bill, but it's removed at the end. So it looks like a lot we're going to be in a discount this month. But it's ways where they think, okay, I asked a first year attorney to draft these discovery requests and they're brand new and they never did this before and it took them 12 hours. And really, I think we can only bill for about eight of that because those extra four hours that I'm really just learning what this was, getting up to speed. So I'm going to reduce four hours off that. But in pretty much every law firm, you get credit for that full 12. So those 12 that you bill, are what go towards your bottom line and make sure of that. Yeah. So that's something you should know because there's a certain way of measuring time and measuring performance. And sometimes this will come into bonus considerations. I've seen bonus metrics that base your their calculations, not on the time you've spent, like the time you've actually spent, but the time that a client paid for. So let's say you spent 10 hours, eight of it made it to the client bill. But then in further negotiations, the client only paid six suddenly the 10 hours that you spent have become six hours that actually count towards your bonus math. So that's another way to understand this. I think that the walk away really is that the billable hour is how law firms and specifically private law firms make money. Everybody does it differently. There's different software. Know your software. Know it really well. And know how you are being judged. A lot of law firms will say in the interview that you can do as much pro bono as you want or admin time gets included. Make sure that's true because if in your first review, they sit down with a spreadsheet and your admin time is sort of in its own bucket and your pro bono time is in its own bucket, then that's not true, right? That's not true. And make a decision for yourself. And so that comes down to what we started this conversation with, which is, are you maybe going to be free from the worst thing that I hate about the bill hour? And so I think I should maybe say the worst thing I hate about the bill hour is just literally this idea that every day the worth of my day is measured against whether or not I build seven to eight hours. And I've done the math for my own requirement and how many vacations I intend to take and that I don't want to work on Christmas. And I know that every day I have to hit somewhere around seven to seven and a half to eight hours of billed work. And I am a firm believer that it all comes out in the wash. So I know there's going to be low days. I know there's going to be 12 hour days. And so I'm never really that stressed if I have a six hour day or four and a half hour day. You've got to have a life. You've got to let it have them flow. Some people take that out more seriously. But even though I don't, I think I'm one of the more relaxed people want to come to that daily hours, I still will get to my end of my day and be like, I didn't hit it. And then you sit there and you're like, well, should I work late or should I come up with another task to do or should I do something else so that I hit this arbitrary hour? And maybe I've done all of the work that really needs to be done today. And I've accomplished the tasks and I've taken the amount of time that I really feel needs to be taken to do this job well. And you should be proud of that. You've done great work in a day. But because you haven't hit an arbitrary total of numbers that you need to spend in a day, you're kind of sitting there at the end feeling like all right, what's one more thing I could do. And to be frank, I had that before I came over to record this podcast. I had hit six hours on the dot. And I was like, well, I really would have liked to have seven today. But I couldn't I wanted to come here and I wanted to record the podcast. I wanted to eat dinner with my husband. And I was like, like six hours is enough for today. But what does that mean for tomorrow? It means I have to build more another day. It just it's a nagging in the back of your head that you know that there is this grand total that you're working towards all of the time. And that's just always in the back of your head that you have to hit this metric. And I have willingly signed up for this. And I absolutely knew with no misgivings what I was going in towards. So I fully got what I was setting up for. I knew what that minimum hour requirement really meant tangibly for my life. And I signed up for it. And it's still just not my favorite thing in the world. And I just don't love that my worth comes down to how many point one increments I can put on a board. So I do want to just say your worst does not come down to how many point one increments you put on a board. And I do know that. Yeah. And never forget that. Yeah. And if you start feeling that way, that's when you stop finding joy in the work. And that's when it's time to think about something different. But I worked in capacities where there was no quote unquote billable hour requirement. There's work week. But I still kept a spreadsheet of my time because I would advise everybody, even if you don't have to keep track of your time to keep track of your time. Because this is a profession that hasn't figured its way out of metrics and comparison. And sometimes you're going to need to sit down with somebody who decides what you make and whether or not you're going to keep working there. And you're going to have to talk about how you spend your time. Actually, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got, which I have now implemented is I have a spreadsheet every month gives its own tab. But you record things that maybe don't show up in this grand total. So you can record, hey, I got this really great piece of feedback on work that I did or hey, I did these things for the first time and did them really well. Or I presented at this conference. And so that took time away, but is a really important professional milestone. And you can also record the negatives to say, well this month, I had COVID for two weeks. And so I wasn't going to bill much those weeks. I'm sick, you know, but it allows you when you're prepping for an annual review or for a negotiation if you want to upgrade your salary, to look back and have these very tangible wins and also maybe explanations for numbers that are lower on the board to just give that context to those available hours. In a way, It can be really powerful in a way that expands the build-blower and expands your work and your performance beyond the build-blower. The way that I think of those type, I'll call it a review, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a review, but those, I don't know, opportunities is I'm my client. And the same way that if I would walk into a room and talk on behalf of somebody else about why they're great, that's what I'm going to need to do and you always need data, so keep your data. So I don't think it goes away, even if you take away the build-blower, even if you don't have to use software, I just, I really, really do not like the build-blower. It makes me feel like I'm beholden to living in six-hour increments in my life. I just don't like the way that that feels. That being said, I practice in criminal defense and a lot of my colleagues and peers around town, we have these conversations with people who have gone out on their own and they just do flat fee work, and we'll talk about when they just totally budgeted the case wrong. So I was just having coffee recently with a woman who asked the client for 20 grand, which seems like a lot of money. 20 grand seems like a lot of money for me to ask somebody for, but that case lasted four years and went to trial twice, and needed experts, and needed software to review discovery. So cases are expensive, litigation is expensive, and quite wrinkly, I don't think anybody should have to pay that kind of money for their freedom, but that's a different TED Talk. I think it could be catastrophic to do flat fees, but not fully understand what's going to happen, and I think it's really hard to know what's going to happen in a case. Yeah, that's like looking at a crystal ball. So I'm thinking about doing a sliding scale, doing a retainer, working against a retainer with an hourly rate and keeping track of my time. I've also seen a range of answers where it's to certain stages of the case. So it's 20,000 up until trial, and then if we try the case, it's another fee, and if we do post-traumatic motions to another fee. But especially in the criminal context, there's actual case law around the reasonableness of fees and what you can charge and what is appropriate, and one of the things that keeps the bill of a hour around is that flat fees can be difficult, and they've been frowned upon by courts at times. I don't know. I just, I think a perfect world for me is just that I would not have to ask somebody for money for my work, because that's not really what I'm doing it, but also I'd be able to make my mortgage payment and feed my child. You know, these are competing things that I'll play with, but I'm excited to figure out what's going to work for me. The billable hour largely doesn't work for me, and I want to get creative about what the alternative is going to be. I think the billable hour doesn't work for me just because I am beholden to something else. I think if I was working for myself and tracking the time simply to understand the time that goes into it, that billable hour feels different to me. Because it's, there's not an eight hour a day requirement. It's a, I'm going to do the work that needs to be done, and I'm only tracking this to better understand what it really does take me to do this, and what is reasonable for these clients and for these fees. I have philosophical issues with it. Like, I just think time is your non-renewable resource. It is literally the most valuable thing you hold. You know, we've talked about it, that my question, I'm going to ask myself in my career, is this how I'm going to spend my time. So monetizing my time just feels really achy to me. I think it's always going to. And I think a lot of people feel that way, which is why, especially at the outset, it's a muscle. It's for me, it's been an unpalatable muscle, but it's still a muscle that's been developed. And if you feel that way, if you're just starting out, if you feel that way, you're not alone in that, but you really do need to advocate for yourself. Yeah, you have, you have to advocate for yourself. And unfortunately, our profession has not moved beyond the billable hour. So one of the best ways that you can advocate for yourself is really understanding where you spend your time and where you spend it fully, including those places that are not client facing hours. If you are in litigation, my biggest piece of advice is to lean into the slow periods. That can feel so scary and so just unnerving because you do know you have these goals. And suddenly you just don't have the work and you're not hitting this, and it feels so stressful. But it will be busy. I promise you. So please lean into the slow times and really deeply internalize that you do not work a nine to five job. And that is a blessing as much as it is a curse. And so if you are in one of those slow periods, go get that massage, go take that long weekend trip, go make the very long midday coffee run because there will be times when you are barely sleeping. Because of just how much work needs to be done. And that's the Evan flow of litigation and learning to ride those waves is a big part of learning to survive in this practice. And I think the only way I figured out how to survive it is to fully lean into both of them. And quite frankly, if you don't stand up for your time, no one else is going to do it for you. And if anybody ever makes you feel weird about you asking questions to understand the metrics by which you are being evaluated professionally, then you need to give some really serious thought to whether or not you're in a healthy and a right environment for you. Because you are being asked to do things, you are being judged to do things, asking questions to make sure that you understand those expectations clearly should never be something that you are made feel weird about in a healthy environment. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I use, because I struggle, I think, like a lot of lawyers to advocate for myself. I'm an advocate for everyone but me. So when I was in a period of assessing my own career and negotiating next steps and considering what I wanted that to look like, I would ask myself, if my daughter came to me and told me about this situation, what would I tell her to do? And oftentimes what I would tell her to do in my head was a lot bolder. And really the thing that should be done, then I would naturally do on my own. And that became the mental trick that I use, which is this advocate for yourself. But that's the framing that I had to put it in was, if my daughter came to me and told me this is what was happening or the offer that she got in or the things that she's considering, how would I, what would I tell her to do? We have different ways of pumping ourselves up to do that. And we also both struggle with advocating for ourselves. And I think it is a deeply female experience, unfortunately, in this profession and in this world still. Power to, if you don't struggle with that. But if you do struggle with that, you've got to find your coping mechanism. Because you're still going to be evaluated on the bill of a hour. And find your community, the biggest asset to learning how you are evaluated and what matters and what to expect is talking to those that have been in the place longer finding that person that you can go to happy hour with and say, this is a cone of silence in this happy hour right now. Can we just have an honest discussion about, you know, this is what the marketing brochure says, but what does it actually mean at the end of the day? Because if you don't have that honesty, it's a lot harder to succeed. And then you also have that community and that sense of camaraderie with the other person about we're now in this together. And we're going to help each other out in this situation. I learned a piece of information. I'll share it with you vice versa. And that is how you make it. I mean, I want to get interviewed me for a job in a law firm that we worked in together. And I grilled you. You did that is something I once interviewed with a firm that did not have me meet a single associate. And I was working through a recruiter and I went to the recruiter and I said, I'm not taking this job until I meet with an associate. And honestly, I didn't even think I wanted the job for meeting the partners. Are they hiding people that would have the same job as me for me? I want to meet who I'm going to work with and who's going to be in this trench with me and I want to be able to have that conversation with them about, okay, what is it like here? And even if that's a more polished version because it's an interview, it still gives you a better sense of your day to day. What kinds of questions should get asked in that interview if you want to get at the real bill of our requirements? I always tended to ask about vacations because that really mattered to me. And so I would ask when's the last time you took a vacation and then ask a little bit more about, okay, what was that like? Did you truly disconnect? Were you still monitoring your emails? Did you have to log on one night to do a rush project? I actually did have an associate talk to me in that informational interview setting while I was interviewing a firm in the middle of her vacation. That's a big red flag to me because I was really worried about that. want those vacations to be not a time where you're interviewing new candidates. Correct. And you might have different priorities, but for me that was a really big priority. And then I would ask about the pro bono credit is a hundred hours. Did you use all hundred hours? Did you go over and did you get credit for that? To try to get a little better sense about how that's implemented. And also I would ask people about, you know, did you work last weekend? Do you often work weekends? And how late do you work at night? How late do you work at night? How early do you start in the morning? And some of those you do have to ask questions because that might just be personal preference because this is not a nine to five job. So I have met people that do their best work from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. And that is not my life. But not my life either. I do my best work between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. which is somebody else's nightmare. Right. And I know people that elect to work every Saturday and Sunday morning because that just works for them. I personally dread opening my laptop on a Saturday or Sunday. And I will do a lot to avoid that. I will work late during the week. If it means I don't have to open my laptop on Saturday. And for some people, nightmare, they would much rather work Saturday morning than Wednesday night. And so you just have to figure out, you have to ask some of those questions to really understand what's going on here is this personal preference or is it I literally had so much work on my plate. I had to work all of Saturday. Those are different different things. And so asking the questions to understand what exactly is going on this important. The more detailed questions you ask, the more detailed answers you will receive. I think what I tend to get asked that will give you zero information back is do you value work life balance? And the answers, yeah, sure value work life balance. You just learn nothing and you ask me nothing. And I learn nothing about you from that question either. And I think that comes back to what we were saying before that if you have this concern about asking detailed questions because you're worried about how it's going to make you look, you're interviewing the place that you're interviewing at just as much as they're interviewing you. And you don't want to work somewhere where you are going to fantasize about getting hit by a bus. Yeah, you don't. You don't want that job. And I think it's really important to set with yourself and understand what is important to you about this. And so like I said the vacation times important to me, I was absolutely told in law school by career counselors like not to ask detailed questions about time offer the ability to disconnect because whatever you don't want to come off as somebody that's going to disappear as an associate, but drink yourself to be chosen. You will be chosen and you will have those also shrunk yourself. Right. And if somebody reacted poorly to me asking if it was acceptable and supported for me to take two weeks off at this law firm, I don't belong at that law firm. And it's a matter of time. It is a matter of time and probably a short matter of time. And so you just really I think you need to understand for yourself what is important and what you are prioritized and ask the questions that align with that and be totally comfortable asking those questions even if someone tells you it's a mistake because it's your life and your priorities. And if you're a first year associate and you didn't even know those questions to ask when you were looking for that job. Send us an email. Yeah send us an email and also been there. Like you don't know the questions to ask until you know the questions to ask. And so if you're sitting in that position you're like, well actually I think I value different things now or I think that my career trajectory looks different now or I understand this in a different context. It is so okay so but those questions and decide you need to make a change. I want to say a thing about law schools. Law schools have their own metrics that they're trying to achieve and one of those metrics is making sure that you get a job. A law school is ranked higher based on the percentage of the class that gets a job. Make sure that you are being given the advice that you need to get the right job and that you're not just being pressured to get any job and just get out there and start working. It matters where you work. It matters who mentors you. It matters that you understand that this is your time. You don't get it back. How is it being evaluated? How do you have to keep track of it? And this is a life that the people you're asking those questions to you know I'm not saying you ask this of the managing partner when you talk to the managing partner. I'm not saying you ask this of the hiring partner. Probably don't actually. Probably don't but ask it of the associate and vibe the associate. Not every associate's the right person asked the question to. I grilled on a guide and grill everybody but I said hey girl how many Saturday nights do you work? And what I said was not a representative answer of your future. But it was my trip at the time. We got you the billable hours complicated but you got this. Thanks for joining the conversation. You can find Bar Review wherever you get your podcasts. Please subscribe and share. Want to keep the conversation going? Follow us on social at Bar Review LLC. Onika will see you there and she'll tell me all about it. Got a question you want us to talk on a future episode? Send it our way. We try to read every you know. And just a reminder we are not your lawyer. This is not legal advice and these opinions are just our own. Cheers!