Legal Commentary

Earthshattering News: Layoffs Increase Likelihood Of Padding Timesheets

By Patrick J. Lamb

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.

Full post as published by In Search of Perfect Client Service on March 17, 2009 (boomark / email).