If you are a lawyer in private practice what is you billing target?

[Blankscreen]

I work in a mid size regional firm and our billing target is 3.75x salary. Out team admin also time records on our files so takes some of our fees.

After another a year of not hitting target and not getting a pay rise I am thoroughly pissed off.

It feels like the only people that hit target are those that work free over time. I've raised this and been told that I just need to time record more.

Just interested to know what other people's experiences are.

But why is this total crap? At x3.4 salary, you're barely covering the cost of employing you. You are simply not performing well enough to earn a bonus. Why is that unfair?

Agreed. I have always seen high salaries as wrapped up with an expectation you will be doing more than a 9-5 job.

I think if law firms weren't allowed to let anyone work beyond their contracted hours salaries would look very different

Yes but the OP needs to prove she is adding value. Others decide to do that by working more hours. She doesn't want to take that path (fine - I'm not saying there's anything wrong with not working extra hours) so she needs to find another way to add value. Get her fee estimates increased, become the person who can complete a matter in half the speed of others, bring in more work for the firm as a whole. Just having clients like you isn't enough on its own as you get more senior.

I disagree. I think mothers/ part-time staff should choose hours that work for them. This includes fitting around childcare etc, but also should be low enough to allow them to "excel" proportionately by going above & beyond if that's what they want + are focused on (if not, then no issue). For example, rather than going back 4 days & week and working to rule they could go back 3 days, have a pro data target, and then do an extra few hours on those evenings or on the 4th day. This is law firm culture.

What's unreasonable is suggesting that someone who leaves at 5pm on the dot should be treated equally with pay & bonus as someone who records an extra 2h a day & stays until 8pm...

Agree, most people I know choose their part time hours in law well aware that the FT salary includes an expectation of a lot of extra hours.

If this was a low paid admin job it would be one thing, but lawyer salaries have that expectation of putting in the hours factored in.

It's fine to decide to just do your hours but being wide eyed that that means no bonus /progression seems strangely naive.

For example, rather than going back 4 days & week and working to rule they could go back 3 days, have a pro data target, and then do an extra few hours on those evenings or on the 4th day.

And unless the bonus is enormous, I suspect that doing that would lose her money - others are working more hours but with unpaid overtime and making bonus, but that will average out to a lower hourly rate for the long hours people.

There is a point about the fact that for some non-chargeable work there's the same amount you have to fit in whether you're part time or full time, and the pro-rata billing targets don't take that into account. It would be fair to try negotiate a slightly lower target on that basis (although of course the same applies to the employer - there are fixed costs of employing you whether you work 1 hour a week or 80*). OP could try and run the numbers, and see if taking that into account would make a material difference. I suspect not massively in reality and there will also be non-chargeable tasks that FT colleagues pick up rather than the PT one because they working when it needs doing and the PT person isn't.

*Guessing to account for that would be unlawful for the employer though.

@DoorPath how on earth does 3.4 x salary barely cover the cost of employing OP?

It would, but realistically if a FT person can work extra hours = bonus, then a PT person needs to work proportionately the same extra hours = pro rata bonus.

Agree re non chargeable to an extent, but I think that if that's a significant part of the work time (not at our firm), then should negotiate that in targets

Because 1x her salary pays her salary.

2x pays her ER NI contributions, pension contributions, benefits and the salary & related contributions of a secretary/ support staff person (cleaner, IT, marketing, receptionist, HR, finance etc),

3x pays heating, rent, light, professional insurance, building repairs, IT software packages, training courses, stationery, advertising costs etc.

I've always heard 3x your salary is roughly (firm dependent) what it costs to employ you. But in a city firm with higher rents/ firm with more support staff, it might work out nearer 3.4x. Either way, the net contribution is quite low (understandably, law firms often run on tight margins & this is in no way a criticism of anyone who bills 3.4x salary- that's an achievement!)

I disagree. NI 10%, pension don’t know, maybe 7%. So let’s round that up to 20%. If OP is on say £80k and we take off the 20% the other costs add up to £128k? No firm would be financially viable.

And anyone who says 3x to cover cost is a partner raking it in.

A 2% pay rise is effectively a pay cut. Under inflationary pay rises have become the norm across all sectors but that does not mean anyone should accept them or view them as "generous"!

Plus not everything billed gets paid.

3x salary to break even is also what I've always been told. If you're in an area with lower ancillary staff salaries and lower rent, a bit less, flash offices in the city a bit more.

If 3x salary meant partners were raking it in, you would see far fewer firms in financial difficulties. If I work out my target salary multiple using my previous life chargeable hours target and standard rates, I needed to make 4.7x to make bonus. Obviously not all work is done at standard rates, but equally we're talking a 1600 hour target, which is on the low side I'd say.

You think firms would exist if partners did not take home any profit?

@TimeandMotion No but they could take less profit.

As other pp have probably said I think the issue is ‘free overtime’. Every lawyer I know works at least 10 hour days, sometimes far more than that (12+ not at all uncommon), and additional time at weekends.

@Blankscreen there are roles in which you can work your "hours" and others when you have time put in extra until you reach the top

If you can do the time in private practice city law, the rewards are huge as a partner.

However, if you feel it's too much of a sacrifice, perhaps in house law would suit better with a better work:life balance

Oh, because to cover your salary in law, it takes x3 minimum. That's to cover the costs of the business and staff who aren't fee earners. So 3.4 is not very good. So no bonus.

It's clear you either aren't in the world of work or else you are and simply don't understand the finance of business.

Adding value above and beyond what you're paid for doesn't necessarily have to involve working additional hours. It should be what you do with the hours that really matters.

Yes, but the OP isn't doing well - they are billing x3.4 their salary. So they are not doing brilliantly within their hours, therefore no bonus. I'm shocked she would expect one with that performance.

If OP wants to work to rule, then she needs to perform better within her hours.

Well, she’s sort of been promoted- she’s being charged out as a senior associate but has had a below-inflation pay rise. It’s odd.

I think I’ve offended you by suggesting that in house might be a better option for someone who doesn’t want to do long hours but I’m not sure why. My friends in house do much more predictable and reasonable hours than any of us did in private practice. IME it tends to follow the norms of the business as a whole- so in house in a bank will still be fairly long hours but other types of business have different cultures.

OP wants to balance her working life with her personal life. In house is one of the options. FWIW I think going part time in private practice (as a fee earner) is rarely satisfactory because of the expectation that you’re always available, so it tends to end up as part time pay for full time work.

I agree.

In house has worked really well for me. I managed to climb the career ladder swiftly even when working part time. And, although if course it something big is coming off you still have to put in the hours, the reality is that you are valued for the quality of the advice you give rather than numbers on a spreadsheet.

OP, as you are reasonably close to the bonus threshold and your salary hasn’t gone up much with promotion, hopefully the higher billing rate of a senior associate will help you meet the 3.75x salary.

However, if a job is fixed fee and a partner is getting all the credit for their hours worked and yours are being written off, that does seem unfair. A write off should surely be roughly proportional across the job?

You haven't offended me! I've even said to OP that in-house might actually be a good option for her as happy clients will on its own support her career and although she's been promoted once, realistically she's not going to get promoted again in pp (or not quickly) unless she can find a way to demonstrate more (financial) value without working the hours. There are options for that within PP but it sounds like in-house might be better for her.

Given she has a salary multiplier target, not an hours target, promotion (higher charge out) without a major salary increase should actually make it much easier to meet her target. And then we're back to the issue on the fees not being high enough but OP has a role to play in how to manage that.

I just don't like the rhetoric of 'not meeting targets in pp, move to in-house - it's easier'. Reality is that (unless you are prepared to take a major paycut) in-house jobs that don't routinely require more than 30mins 'unpaid overtime' (which is what OP wants) are few and far between. She has a job now that will allow her to work the hours she wants and has promoted her (I take your point on salary but then I'm in house and didn't get a pay rise or bonus this year at all) but she wants to make more money (the bonus). Unless she's currently spectacularly underpaid for what she does, I don't think moving in house will get her that. Long term it might if her skill set is better suited to in-house that PP, but it's hard to tell from the information whether that's actually the case.

Hi OP. So, looking at your most recent post I can now see the glaring problem in your set up, which is that your “part time” contract isn’t part time at all, it’s fixed hours.

If I understand correctly, you have an arrangement whereby your “official” finish time is 4:30 but your full time colleagues have an official finish time of 5:30. So their contracts are nominally 7 hours a day = 45 hour week and yours is 6 hours a day= 30 hour week. You get paid 2/3 of what you would if you had the 7 hour day and your annual leave is also pro rated.

The problem is that you are (out of necessity because of your other commitments) treating that 4:30 finish as a hard stop. Your colleagues are not doing the same with their 5:30.

I’m not surprised that you are “working to your hours” because if you did not you would be sacrificing 1/3 of your salary and leave for absolutely no benefit whatsoever.

So, your target. Let’s say that the average lawyer spends an hour of the working day on breaks and non-chargeable work (this assumes never taking a full hour for lunch and very efficient transfer between tasks, plus minimal BD and training). Assuming 25 days’ leave a year prorated to 17, that gives you maximum 1200 possible chargeable hours (5x5x48). You gain a little bit from the rounding of units, in that if you record in 6 minute units and you do 2 tasks that take 3 minutes each you record (entirely legitimately) 12 minutes in total.

If you had an hours recorded based target it should be easy enough to work out whether it is possible to reach your target in your committed hours.

But your target is billings-based. So step 1 (and you’ve probably already done this) is to look at your charge-out rate and work out how many hours you need to record to meet that target. Is that feasible without working beyond 4:30? Crucially, how much can be written off before you dip below the target?

Your partner seems to have a capped fee business model. That is not really compatible with a billings-based target, but the best way to cope with it is to find ways to be ruthlessly efficient, so that caps are not being exceeded. This will also require you to take on more matters.

I’d also be questioning how they apportion the write-off. You said your partner is gobbling up the fees at the start of the matter. If he or she is not being efficient then the write off should be of the partner hours not yours and you are being shafted if it’s allocated any other way. On the other hand if the all the work was truly needed but the cap was just too low then they need to allocate the write off evenly between you and also reconsider the fee structure.

If the fees are not capped then you need to be very sure that your time is not being written off because you’ve just taken too long to do certain things. The higher your charge out rate the quicker you have to get on simple stuff. Also there is a client expectation that work will be done by the fee earner of the lowest rate/grade capable of doing it.

Do you have a clear idea of what the partner means when they tell you to “record more”? Normally I’d expect that to mean that they thought you were not capturing all your time-a common problem. But if a lot of your time is being written off anyway I can’t see how that would make a difference.

Do they actually mean “work more hours”? If so, that can’t be squared with your working arrangements.

I’m afraid that you seem to be caught in a combination of bad matter management by your bosses, a non-industry standard way of setting a target and a contractual working arrangement that really shafts you.

A final thought- the above is all about meeting the target. That’s for pay rise. I do think that you need to be realistic that a bonus is only awarded to people who exceed it. That’s why it’s called a bonus. If you can’t do more on your own billings then the only other way to get recognised is to do something non-chargeable that has financial benefit- eh you can show that your great client relationship skills brought in x new matters for others to work on, or you created a precedent that made the team more efficient and reduced write off. Woolly “great feedback from clients” stuff is nice and will keep your job secure as you are a safe pair of hands, but you have a basic professional duty to do your job well anyway, and a pat on the back doesn’t bring in any more money, so no reason to reward it with a bonus.