2400 Reasons To Brush Up That Resume

0:28Welcome to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. Small talk about the weather and so on so that we seem like we're people. I'm a little concerned that it is August and it is 70 degrees where I live. Oh. Just outside of New York City. It feels ridiculous that I'm in a sweatshirt. I mean, listen, I don't mind it. Listen, I enjoy a good fall moment as much as the next one. But fall should be a September-October moment, not an August moment. Feels a little catastrophic. I'm so happy that it's not 95 degrees. I'm not saying it's sad for me. I'm saying it's wrong. Like you can be, you can personally enjoy something and still be, you know.

1:09Take that global warming people. Concerned about catastrophic climate change, which is what I am. This was like a crappy summer. I feel most of it was like rainy or weirdly, I don't know. I didn't like it. I feel like I didn't get to really enjoy the glory of the sun. Okay, so duly noted, you don't like August. Or you don't like August cold. Well, it just, it feels wrong. It feels like a weird way to end summer. I mean, before Labor Day should be hot. After Labor Day, if we had this weather, I'd be pleased this punch. It just feels raw. All right. Are you deliberately going with old-timey language with your models of the weather that are pre-global warming?

1:56Summer should be hot. What? It shouldn't be controversial or weird or statement one has to make. What's next? Snow in January? Come on, get with the times. No, the problem is it's going to snow in like November. It's going to wind up snowing from like November to April. And there's very little that is more depressing than April snow. That's just true. Don't talk about snowing in November, else Axl Rose is going to do an updated version. Man, what a cool music video that was. Do you all remember music videos? No, but this explains your old-timey language. Okay, easy there, oldest man on the panel.

2:35Back in my day, MTV had music. I mean, listen, I appreciate MTV's change to the challenge and ridiculousness as their sole forms of entertainment these days as a pretty big challenge fan, but, you know. Fantastic. Oh, well, there we go. very little you contributed to this conversation, Joe. You're big on criticism today. We have to keep up custom. You have to keep up custom at this point, you know. I contributed. You didn't. All you do is roll your eyes. That doesn't translate to an audio form of entertainment. No, I. Joe contributes to the ending. I pointed out how old you are. I pointed out like, yeah, no.

3:19You repeated the sentiment I shared. Well, no, the MTV part. But yeah. All right. So with all that said, let's begin talking about actual subjects. We have some big law news out of the week. Yeah. Well, I think our biggest story of the week was news out of King and Spalding. Big law firm shared with their associates that they should be accounting for 2400 productive hours. All right. So to give the sense for anyone's listening who's not worked in a law firm, I know we have some listeners like that. So how this operates is you have to write down the time that you are doing for billable work. That's how people get paid.

4:07And they collect all that and they're like, oh, you worked on this case matter for this many hours, billed at this rate, you get paid. So throughout the day, you work. You're in the office and working more than the amount of time you're actually billing because things come up. You have lunch. you chat with somebody by the water cooler. So there's time throughout the day that is not captured by the billing software because you're doing other stuff and that's fine. So it always was true that, you know, in back of the day, the standard was kind of 2000 hours billed. So that's a 40 hour work week, but that's what you're supposed to be billing.

4:42And you're supposed to be there longer. Ultimately, you kind of are there like 23, 2400 hours, but you aren't billing all that time throughout the year. What this is now saying, Catherine, is that they are expecting, King Spalding's expecting that everyone's captured billing software explained that they were doing stuff for 2400 hours. Obviously, you can't put down, I went to the bathroom on your thing. So they're expecting you to do, even if it's not billable work, to account for non-billable work, which is the I was doing a pro bono thing or I was doing a CLE. I was doing professional reading, whatever it is.

5:25Yeah, they are describing them as productive, non-billable contributions such as practice and business development, professional development, recruiting and other practice and firm initiatives. So that's a lot of extra time. And I think that some of it was there's always some of those hours that everyone is doing throughout the year. And maybe they're accounting for it just to kind of prove, you know, make their case to the firm that they should be advanced, especially as you get up around that kind of partnership level. you do want to make it very clear to the firm that, of course, you're doing your fair share of recruitment.

5:57And you're, you know, you're on this panel on this at this conference and, you know, all these sorts of things that would be captured by these descriptors really make your case to the firm as to why you are valuable to them. But to require it and say that if you don't get these 2400 hours, you're no longer considered to be in good standing is questionable. And I think that it's really it's a matter of really, I think, packaging and messaging this requirement, because there's always been requirements that you have to, you know, do many of these things. But how the firm is or not describing it to associates, I think, is really causing quite a bit of confusion, concern, worry amongst the associate rank.

6:43So 2 ,400 hours being capturable by a specific thing, that functionally means you're going to be in the office at least 2 ,600 hours throughout the year. This is massively more than I think a lot of people are prepared for. I mean, there are certainly firms where people are expected to be working 2 ,400 hours, but billable. But I think for the majority of places where you're in that 1 ,900 to 2 ,100 hour range, the logic was that all the uncaptured free time throughout the year got you up to 24. Now, with this, we're talking about people being in the office 2 ,600 to 2 ,800 hours a year. That is an exorbitant amount of time.

7:25Yeah, the requirement on billable hours has remained steady at 1950 hours in order to be technically bonus eligible, but you still have to be in good standing, which also includes all this other stuff, which makes me kind of wonder what's going on at K &S. Are they that hard up for people to take summer associates to recruitment lunches? Like, are they are they having a real problem convincing people to do these kind of to go to a ball game as part of their summer associate stuff? Maybe this is also the firm, Joe, that you wrote about earlier this year that is giving these kind of passive aggressive negotiations and threats about not being in the office enough.

8:07Yeah, that's what this really seems like. It's more of this kind of micromanagement of the personnel, which is problematic on a lot of levels. I mean, the COVID experience leading to a hybrid work experience, there have been stumbles. There are reasons to believe that the incoming associates are well behind where they should be, probably because we're really terrible at training as a profession. And the only way it gets done is through soft learning by just being in an office. And so with no one in the office, problems have happened. I get it. That's an issue why firms want to bring people back in.

8:46The process of doing it through kind of the micromanagement and surveillance is not productive. It is going to lead to people defecting and leaving firms and heading elsewhere. And it's manifesting in all sorts of ways. And I think part of this hourly thing is part of that. I think they're trying to get a handle on forcing people to put in time for the day when they're not in the office. They're trying to really exert more control over that. I will say I just did a quick number crunch. 2 ,700 hours of being quote-unquote at work, if that's kind of what you eyeball as what it means, that's like a 52, 53-hour week.

9:33And that's a lot to do. consistently all the time. Well, it's also, there's a lot of things that it is also a lot for, right? Because sometimes it's, you can't get that many hours because, you know, a case you were on, a matter you were on just closed, no one staffed you yet. You start worrying that if you have one or two days where you're not, you know, able to put in 10, 12 hours that you're going to be behind. And then, you know, you're going to be forced into a position where you have to find 15, 16-hour workdays? I'll tell you, the worst run of my career was at the big firm. I was on 11 matters, which is a fairly high.

10:12Well, it depends how active they are, I suppose. Well, that was the whole problem. None of them were active at any given time. But people were coming to me and being like, your numbers are low this week. And I said, they are. But what am I going to do if I add another matter? One of these 11 is going to blow up the next week. And then where am I? And I think that also technology is weirdly hurting that because it used to be, you know, if you were in that position where you just had a slow week, but you needed hours, there was some document review or other sort of, you know, staffing project that you're not really on, but you can throw, you know, they always need bodies to help.

10:51And you could do that for a couple of days, kind of in between the actual cases you're kind of, you're really on and you're advancing. And that is less and less true. And I think it's really interesting. But this was also, I think, related and particularly, you know, to your point shows that this is really about managing and micromanaging in a really weird way. This is not the only story where that happened this week. We also reported on DLA Piper going to four days a week in the office. But here's the twist. And I think this is what makes it interesting, as opposed to something we've talked about a lot.

11:26It's not for everyone. It's only for corporate associates. I just wanted to say something to one of Joe's points several points ago. You mentioned that if the firm trends towards micromanaging, associates may go elsewhere. But to what degree is this normative? Will they really go elsewhere if this is also the culture at other firms? Like you said, there isn't an explicit additional 400 hours, but there is a cultural assumption that this is what you should be doing? Would it really be that different if they were to go elsewhere? I think so. I think there's a couple of reasons why that it is different.

12:01First of all, a lot of people, particularly when they're in the interview process, assume it doesn't apply to them. Sure, some people feel like I have to do 2 ,400 hours, but I won't feel that way, or it'll be easy for me, or when it's written down and it's a policy this way, people have a way of overlooking it during the interview process. But beyond that, when you write something down, I think that it very much speaks to how you manage, right? Just because there's an assumption, well, we all just need to pull our own weight is a very different place to work than someplace that has everything in triplicate and a policy written down for every eventuality.

12:41I think that those are different management styles, and that's what this is indicative of. Well, this is definitely – it is still an outlier even amongst big law to do it this way. And I will also say that there's a cut point that's a little hard to work out where you're at a big law firm and you're making big law money and getting big law experience. And you get called by people trying to get you to move to a mid-sized or small law firm where the hours are explicitly less but the pay is also less. and there's a point where you say, yeah, that sounds better, but I'm not quite there yet. I still have money to make here.

13:19I still have experience to get here. When you make the big law firm less pleasant, you increase the, you change that cut point. You change the threshold. Where you go like, oh, well, maybe I will take this new job. Yeah, I think that's definitely true. Because it is true. You're right that big law tends to follow each other, but there are, you know, it's not all big law And eventually people often move to the others. Right. Well, I think I usually think about it in terms of laddering, but I think that it laterally, but I think it is a great point that like the worst things get at, like, say, K &S, the more midsize seems appealing.

13:55And I don't really people usually don't think about that as being the competition, but it is. Yeah, no, I mean, that is the primary. That's the primary lateraling out, especially in litigation, I think a little bit. So in other, obviously, there are some practice areas that are just, I mean, when you're servicing, when the only people who require the services of your practice area are JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, you're like, yes, then you probably end up being stuck in big law forever. But for most other practice areas, there is a world of clients at all levels, and you can move to that. DLA Piper, corporate.

14:31Yeah. So DLLE Pipers, the way that they're dealing with their hybrid workforce is that different practice groups are able to make their own rules as, you know, individual practice leaders and different offices have different requirements and have different personnel. And it might make sense for different places to do different things. But the way that that has shaken out at the firm is that corporate associates are going back to the office four days a week. which I think is really interesting because they are fundamentally different, you know, these different practice groups. And your experience at a firm is very much, I think, dependent on not just your practice group, but for which individual partner even you're working for.

15:09But it's interesting to see such a big firm make this kind of call.

15:20That's my impression of the hold music your callers hear right before they hang up. Smith AI pairs AI with real-life agents to answer calls, qualify leads, book consultations, and even send retainers 24-7. Better intake, fewer missed opportunities. No more hold music solos. Try it free at smith.ai. Mention above the law or use code NOHOLD at sign up to claim 20 % off your first two months of service. Every legal professional wants to put their clients first, but billing, payments, and case management get in the way. 8AM is the professional business platform that helps law firms get paid faster, manage cases more easily, and grow with confidence.

16:05Trusted by over 260 ,000 legal professionals, 8AM integrated solutions like 8AM Law Pay and 8AM My Case help simplify the business of running your firm. so you can actually put your clients first first. Visit 8am.com slash legal talk to learn more. All right, we are back. Let's talk about the Sunday morning funnies. Oh, okay. That's how you're going to begin it. Let's start it on the lighter note. It's going to get pretty heavy in a minute. So let's start that way. Calvin and Hobbes is an iconic comic strip that obviously everybody knows and has read extensively, right, Catherine? Okay. You see, this is a little dig at me because I mentioned in the course of Joe writing this that I was not a particular, I was not a connoisseur of the Calvin and Hobbes oeuvre.

16:58I think that my most - I think it's courageous that you're willing to say something like that. Two to three points. I will say you are not alone, Catherine. Two, which one is the feline? Hobbs. Okay. I knew that. See, I knew that because Calvin's the one that's peeing on all those trucks. Sure. Okay. Power to you. Is Hobbs a Tigger? Well, Hobbs is a stuffed animal that is, you know, only real and kind of Calvin's imagination. First of all, there's only one Tigger. Tigger's the only one. That is part of the song. Canonically, you're right. I'm sorry. You're right. I guess I'm slipping on my poo knowledge, you know.

17:38P-O-O-H, just to be clear. P-O-O-H. So, yeah. So Calvin, though, has made his way into the annals of the Supreme Court, courtesy of Justice Jackson, who we had another one of our classic shadow docket opinions. These are the opinions where there's no real briefing, no real opinions. They just kind of make vibes. Ostensibly, the shadow docket or the emergency applications docket, what's supposed to happen here is this is where the Supreme Court gets involved in issuing or affirming kind of equitable responses on a temporary level. You know, like we're issued – we agree with the lower court that this case is enjoined until we get to something better.

18:22They are not merits decisions. They are not technically binding precedent because they are just intermediary or supposed to be. That said, the Supreme Court has, over the course of the last several years, taken upon itself to utilize this docket in order to advance its merits-based policy results by forcing people into results. new one uh this is another in the run of trump cutting things there was an attempt to cut lots of grants for the national institutes of health lots you know this is part of the rfk junior belief that we should replace vaccines with crystals and uh and bowls and quinoa that was not a joke no i mean that that is not necessarily a joke uh it is it is hyperbole perhaps uh but so So they're cutting a lot of cancer research, vaccine research, et cetera.

19:16There was a legal challenge to this because this is an arbitrary and capricious action. We do have an Administrative Procedures Act to prevent agencies from willy-nilly making these sorts of cuts. That has now reached the Supreme Court. and the Supreme Court issued a fractured emergency docket ruling where they said that basically the people who lost their grants to research this stuff can't go to the federal courts to get relief for the fact that they've lost their thing. However, they can go to the federal courts to prove that the rule that took it away from them was wrong. But then they have to, after that, go to the court of federal claims to get it back.

20:03This is a decision of one. This was Amy Coney Barrett doing her own thing. So it was a two decisions, basically, which had four people on one side, four people on the other on both counts. And Barrett joined one side on one and the other side on the other. Whatever. Point is, if you lost your grant, even though you have some degree of recourse under what Barrett has weirdly decided in her own private personal jurisdiction island, even though you have some – Way to like put law professor this decision, right? Yeah, even though you do have some sort of recourse, it is an impractical one, and so they practically allowed the administration to just slash all of these.

20:46Justice Jackson wrote a concurring in part and dissenting in part, because that's what happens when you have this kind of a decision, and explicitly referenced Calvin Ball, which folks who know this cartoon strip know Calvin Ball was a game that existed in multiple strips throughout the course of the run. It is a fake game that has no fixed rules that can't be played the same way twice, and it's basically Calvin just making up rules and Hobbes making up rules as they go. Justice Jackson says that that ultimately is how to describe this court's jurisprudence, Calvin Ball with a twist. And the twist being that as opposed to Calvin Ball, which had no fixed rules, there is one at the Supreme Court, which is this administration always wins.

21:29I mean, obviously, there's lots of bad things to say about the actual decision and the appreciation that I have for Justice Jackson in calling it out. But whenever I hear that there are no rules here, my pop culture reference of choice is the Grease movie when they're about to do the race and and they hang out the window and say rules are there ain't no rules. And so that's that's what I thought of. Great. Good job. I'm just I think it's great that you're pushing pushing the back against the idea that you're too old. OK. Yeah. Your response. Everybody watches Grease. I don't think that that is age limited at all.

22:10Listen, I hear Grease and I think about the Sunday, Monday, Happy Days song. I know they're separate, but they just feel the same in my mind. Well, they're both set in the same era. That's cool. One thing that this made me think about, this is the part where I, this is not nearly as legal, I guess, but it is legally tangential. So Covenant Hops, Supreme Court has also mentioned redfish, bluefish in this one case where I think it was a case on like Sarbanes-Oxley or something. They had to determine if a fish was an object or like if a – I think if a fish was an object or something. Well, whether bees or fish is the question, I believe.

22:49Okay. But I wonder how often – Which they are under statute as it turns out. Yeah. But I wonder how often like kids stories make their way into Supreme Court jurisprudence. Argle Bargle. Yeah. I mean, there's lots of. Is that is that a thing? Is that a kid story thing? That was a Scalia ism. And I believe it kicked off a hashtag trend of children's books by Scalia and what they would actually be named. Oh, OK. So I had two different cases, both involving fish. Yeah, Chris, you're right. That was the tangible object case where Kagan did that. The other case is that the bees are classified as fish under the Endangered Species Act.

23:43And did that have any reference to a children's story? That did not, no. Oh, so you just brought it up because you wanted to talk about bees. Well, obviously, we were talking about bees before the show began, so it was a cop of mine. That actually might be why it came to my head so quickly. Yeah, no, this was – Kagan wrote this, God, like 10 years ago or something like that now and became famous. So the only other kind of interesting point about this decision, which bears some understanding, is Gorsuch writes a separate opinion kind of angrily scolding the lower courts for defying the Supreme Court's decisions, which is interesting since the decisions he's talking about are shadow docket emergency applications, meaning they can't really defy them because they're not supposed to be precedent and orders.

24:36So that was an interesting change. I know there have been some conversation other like I know Professor Vladek wrote a piece about this just the other day about this is dangerous and it fuels kind of an anti-court like a real erosion of the rule of law to go down this road of Supreme Court gets to make proclamations with zero briefing and expects other courts to convert those into precedence merits opinions by by vibe uh and that's problematic and that did end up in there too which was kind of you know if any if jackson needed any help proving that this is calvin ball gorsuch was right there gorsuch was right there to help out it is so weird hearing rhetoric coming from the right about how judges are corrupt because they make their decisions and people are binded by them but then having the right-wing judges being like hey this is binding now too and And there's not – like, there's a clear tension there, and I feel like it's not being – Yeah, the whole shadow docket thing is problematic.

25:42And it was problematic before when they still pretended that these things weren't merits decisions. But the fact that a few of them are really pushing that, and we had an opinion, an order a couple weeks ago that suggested that this was how people should – lower courts should treat these opinions. Really dangerous stuff. also quick shout out to David Latt he has a thing where he looks at the political leanings of people and how they refer to that thing people on the left tend to use shadow docket people on the right used to use things like emergency docket or I don't know rutabaga people have so many different names for it and I just find that skewing that like that kind of like parallax view of what to call the thing based off your like uh you know whether or not you think it's legitimate because whether or not it helps your guys you know that that's super interesting and all right now i'm just going to take a speculation i kind of think it was a right uh it's weird that that would be true because i believe the term shadow docket was coined by a conservative law professor uh i think so i'll have to check up on that is it is it would have been conservative but now after trump rediscovered that hey liberty matters thing because like there was a big shift in the party Yeah, that could be true.

26:57But yeah, no, I have now confirmed. Yeah, William Bowdy coined the term, who is a prominent, you know, has been a FedSoc member and so on. So yeah. Every legal professional wants to put their clients first, but billing, payments and case management get in the way. 8AM is the professional business platform that helps law firms get paid faster, manage cases more easily and grow with confidence. Trusted by over 260 ,000 legal professionals, 8AM integrated solutions like 8AM Law Pay and 8AM My Case help simplify the business of running your firm so you can actually put your clients first, first. Visit 8AM.com slash LegalTalk to learn more.

27:47That's my impression of the hold music your callers hear right before they hang up. Smith AI pairs AI with real live agents to answer calls, qualify leads, book consultations, and even send retainers 24-7. Better intake, fewer missed opportunities. No more hold music solos. Try it free at smith.ai. Mention Above the Law or use code NOHOLD at sign up to claim 20 % off your first two months of service. All right, so what's our final topic? We're talking about some big law executive orders. And by that, I mean, we know that nine firms have capitulated to Donald Trump and offered varying amounts of pro bono payola in exchange for Trump getting off their back.

28:34These nine were once kings among men and now are merely raves continuing their work for the Dark Lord. There you go. And you're able to write about two firms that we know have begun their work on behalf of Donald Trump. So this is interesting just on the grounds that – so when all those – the surrender gate firms made these pro bono payola deals that Catherine's talking about, that all happened. We were wondering what they would do to fulfill these orders. They responded to Congress. When Congress asked them to explain how this wasn't patently illegal, they said, oh, no, we're going to work for some veterans' charities.