Letters to the Editor
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Hours billed IS equal to productivity
The unit of output for a firm lawyer is a billable hour. Someone who produces more billable hours is someone who is more productive. The piece seems to imply that someone who takes 5 hours to do something is less productive than someone who takes 4 - in fact, if those hours are to be billed, the 5 hour lawyer is more valuable, since he/she will generate more revenue.
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cestmoi123
You're confusing profitability with productivity. Productivity is supposed to be a measure of work done. If Person A does X amount of work in 4 hours, they are more productive than Person B that does X amount of work in 5 hours. If both were to work the same number of hours, Person A will get more work done.
However, if all you are counting is how much was charged, then Person B is charging an extra hour for the same amount of work and therefore is generating more revenue for the same work.
But if Person A and Person B work the same number of hours, Person A will potentially have more clients which equals more potential billable hours and is better in the long term for the company.
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Lynx -- c'estmoi isn't all that confused
I don't think c'estmoi is confused, I just think you disagree about what it is law firms produce -- that is, "how you define the word 'productive'".
You seem to think that law firms produce legal analysis. C'estmoi believes law firms produce billed hours. I'm inclined to think your belief yields a more accurate view of the value law firms add to our economy, but I'm willing to bet many if not most law firms are more interested in manufacturing as many billable hours as possible.
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Seems logical...
... that childless women sublimate their child-bearing instincts by going into a different kind of labour, delivering documents in triplicate rather than just duplicates of themselves.
Childless men, on the other hand, put all their energy into hunting women, or possibly other men, so they are often away from their desk or working on zipper problems.
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billable hours and productivity
I've worked in a billable hour environment, and it encourages attorneys to do more work, but not necessarily to take more time on each particular task. For one thing, the clients often are quite sophisticated and will know better than to pay an attorney to spend more time on a task than the task warrants. (In fact, the clients often don't want to pay for a reasonable amount of time either, but that's another issue). Clients also will balk at paying attorneys to do tasks that the clients think could be handled by a less expensive associate or by a paralegal.
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Billable Hours
Unfortunately, virtually any study that uses billable hours as its basis is doomed. As others have said, it's a measure of how much time you spend working, not how well you work, and certainly not how efficiently you work.
Certainly, mothers with children can't put in as many billable hours. One has to wonder, though, is that really a problem? Really? If it is, we need to completely reconsider the entire model of using billable hours.
When you think about it, isn't it kind of bad that a law firm measures your worth based on how much money you milked from your clients. Zealous defenders, indeed!
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No, women with stay at home dads are the most productive lawyers.
Or Honduran nannies, or whatever - a Staff of some kind.
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Randvek
Which for-profit industry DOESN'T measure your worth as an employee by how much profit you help them generate?
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Eh...
Broadsheet and some others are being a bit shifty. Usually someone who produces more billable hours is also doing more work and is more profitable. Of course, there's the "two people who produce the same X amount of work in different time frames" example but that's not the norm.
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Impossible to comment without source text, but ...
It's impossible to comment without being able to read the entire article, but that's never stopped anyone on the internet before, so...
My first thought is, literally, "Alberta??" I mean, come on. If someone did a study of Bible-belt law firms in the US and concluded that the socially conservative population showed a propensity toward traditionally gendered family roles in the workplace, how shocking would that be?
So right off the bat, a study that crosses the entire Canadian population would be a definite improvement.
Secondly, how do they correct for disparities in professional expertise? Let's make the (extremely plausible) hypothesis that, were we to do the necessary study, we would find that men are disproportionately represented in the upper ranks of law firms in Alberta. Let's also add the (charitable) proviso that none of that bias is due to prejudice or discriminatory factors — in other words, that women and men have absolutely equal access to prestigious Canadian law schools where they are absolutely equally well-trained — so that the only explanation for the disproportion is simply that women in law are as a group younger and therefore don't yet have seniority.
If the hypothesis is correct, then any firm which follows the usual pattern of giving the underlings the lion's share of the busy work (and the long hours) is going to see women tending to bill more hours than men — and at a lower rate, to boot — purely because of a generational gender divide (remember we're being charitable about institutionalized sexism).
So did the study account for that factor? How? If it corrects for age alone that might not be enough — women with children seem likely (the indominatble Bader Ginsburg notwithstanding) to have taken longer to get through law school.
Since we don't know (without shelling out $30), we can only speculate, but prima facie it doesn't seem like the study's conclusions would hold up in court.
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My Experience
In my experience as a manager, younger, childless women by and large are the hardest workers. However, older women with children are generally more effective. Young single guys have generally been my laziest employees, and married dads seem to have a bit more commitment to the job.
Now these aren't lawyers, but still, my experience over the last 15 years or so that I have been managing people has been pretty consistent.