“I am a junior lawyer in the London office of a national firm, working in a ‘corporate support’ department.
“The firm’s clear policy is that you should record all of your time spent working on a client file, but the reality is very different. Partners and senior associates are judged on the ‘profitability’ of their clients and matters, so I am constantly being told by superiors in my own and other teams to ‘watch’ the amount of time I record on a particular file number, with the clear implication being that I should not record all of my time. I am often given a figure of how much they want me to record on that file, a figure which often bears little resemblance to the time a particular piece of work takes to do. Many don’t even bother with the charade, and just say ‘don’t record more than three hours on this’. This is a practice that seems widespread throughout the firm.
