Does "Venting" Count as Billable Time?

This lawyering business is exhausting. I'm done. Like, for the year.

It hasn't been a good week. It hasn't been a good month.

It caught me off guard...my job is what it is, and I had settled into what I felt was a good routine. I was billing eight hours a day, which placed me nicely at the monthly target (allowing for some lost hours here and there). It seemed like I was handling it.

And then...I don't know what happened. Maybe extra work came in, or maybe the people at work decided I wasn't pulling my weight. (Some signs indicate the latter may be true, but I find it unfortunate. As anyone who has ever honestly billed time understands, for every 0.8th of an hour billed, there's generally another 0.2 that disappears...and that's IF you are actually really diligent and not chit-chatting with coworkers or surfing the Internet or making a Starbucks run. In other words, I work pretty damn hard to get eight hours a day.)

I'm inclined to attribute things to the "extra work" factor. This is all well and good, but I am only human. When you bring in a new client who tells you their previous counsel billed 50 hours a week on the work, and the work is split between you and one other person – you know, 'cuz you're the only associates who actually do that kind of work – and, hello, I was already billing eight hours a day before that...well, where the heck is the extra 25 hours a week supposed to come from? Do the math.

It ultimately means that I've been staying up until 2, 3 in the morning working.

And as much as I hate that – as much as this is avowedly and most vehemently precisely the life I didn't want to have – y'know, I could deal with it if I thought it was just temporary. As in, well, there's a ton of work now but maybe next week it will be easier. But it won't. Unless we start to lose clients because we are incapable of giving them the attention they demand, this is the new norm.

Or I could handle it if they said, hey, now that we have so much extra work (and the extra 25 per week is far from the only new thing), maybe it's time to bring lucky #3 on board. So far, however, the resistance to this option has been remarkable. The best I've heard is, well, maybe we'll interview someone for this position in the fall, and maybe they'll come be a summer associate with us, and maybe they'll get an offer, and maybe they'll choose our firm and not the other firm they split with, oh, and maybe they'll choose our section over the other section they clerk with inside the firm, and if that's the case, well, awesome, they'll start in fall 2009...oh, ha ha, that's assuming they don't get a (strongly encouraged) clerkship, which would push it to 2010, unless of course they do a two-year clerkship, and then it would be 2011.

People. At this rate, I will not be there in 2011.

I can only hope that something, somewhere gives. I don't know what I would do otherwise. It seems like the in-house jobs don't materialize until, what, year 3? Year 5? Or I could go to a different firm, where I would be served a nice heaping helping of exactly the same. Options in my field are limited – and damn it, on balance I would rather practice this type of law than any other (just not, heh, in place of little things like "eating" and "sleeping").

Well. There's also option 3. I bought a lottery ticket today.

(Needless to say, this post isn't long for this world.)