I spoke to two law firm partners this week, both of whom told me that their hourly expectation was 2,400 hours per year, consisting of 2,000 billable hours and 400 non-billable hours (administration, firm events, continuing education, business promotion, and mentoring).
I set about to do some math and determine how many hours these people have to spend on their mental and physical health and personal relationships. The law firms are all advertising their mental health initiatives, so I knew that it would be substantial!
There are, according to Doctor Google, 240 workdays a year in Ontario.
Multiplying by 24 gives you 5,760 hours during those workdays.
Subtract 2,400 hours, and that leaves you with 3,360 hours to enjoy yourself.
Except that you need to sleep and ideally you would do that for 8 hours a night, so let’s subtract another 1,920 hours.
Good news, that still leaves them 1,440 hours for fun!
But wait, those 2,000 hours that these partners have to work are billable hours, and we all know that you cannot bill for every single minute during your working hours. Occasionally you have to go to the bathroom, or take a personal phone call, or go to the doctor, or eat lunch, or converse with a colleague. And some tasks are just not billable. A very conservative estimate is that most people would lose about 2 hours during the workday to such trivial pursuits. So, multiply 2 times 240 to get 480, and subtract that from the available hours to bring you down from 1,440 to 960 hours.
Some of us like to shower every day or put on make-up, or get dressed, or drink coffee or eat breakfast, so let’s allow another 1.5 hours per day for all of that (240 x 1.5 = 360). Our 960 personal hours are now reduced to 600.
If we divide our 600 personal hours by our 240 working days, we get 2.5 hours a day. Surely that is enough time to commute to work for those who are not fortunate enough to work from home exclusively, eat dinner, go to the gym, spend time with our life partner and our children, and relax and enjoy our evening.
No, it is not. It is bloody impossible to work like that and be physically and mentally healthy and nurture your personal relationships.
(Let’s not even consider those who would like more than two weeks of vacation a year, or who commute a substantial distance, or who lose more than 2 hours of billable time during their day, or who want to attend an event at their children’s school. And let’s not think about the pressure at some firms to exceed the billable hour target if you really want to climb the ladder.)
The fallacy in all of this is obvious. It assumes that these partners are not working on weekends and holidays. Of course they are. It is baked into the system.
Once again, when law firms move the mental health file from marketing to operations, I will begin to believe that they give a damn about the health of their lawyers.
This article was originally published by Law360 Canada, part of LexisNexis Canada Inc.