It might be tempting to think that recording excessive billable time is all a product of American culture. The Clifford Chance requirement of 2,420 billable hours is so high that the complaints of its associates in New York might be thought irrelevant to law firms on this side of the Atlantic. That would be a mistake for any UK law firm. The memo quotes an associate as saying the requirement for billable hours “makes me feel that management cares exceedingly about hours billed, but gives no thought to the quality of my work”.
These are associates who express a willingness to work 2,000 billable hours in a year. What makes the difference is the emphasis on billable hours at the expense of everything else. If fee earners are doing 1,200 billable hours a year, asking them to do 1,500 will have the same effect. Increasing from 1,500 to 1,700 will cause disaffection. Some of the hours will be padded, they will be encouraged to work inefficiently, they will repeat tasks to record more hours and they will procure, and keep to themselves, far more work than they can do to a reasonable standard.
