It’s Friday and I’m feeling spicy, so here goes:

The American law firm norm of billable hours is ableist, discriminatory, and directly responsible for the mental health and drug abuse crisis in the profession. https://twitter.com/unionsaltbae/status/1352766485496791042

Lawyers tend to think of themselves as white collar professionals, but the truth is that our profession shares many fundamental qualities with “unskilled”, low paid piece work in factories and on farms- our worth is directly and intrinsically linked to our productivity.

(I paused this thread bc I got called to dinner, but I def have more to elaborate on!)

I’m already getting a lot of feedback from folks who think I’m implying that billables are the single force behind the mental health crisis in the profession. I’m not saying that- I’m saying that billable requirements have *a* direct impact on the mental health crisis in law.

Now to address the claim that I’m sure many people will happily dismiss as SJW nonsense: why are mandatory billables ableist and discriminatory?

First, mandatory billable minimums (let’s call them MBMs) work off of normative assumptions of how much work someone can accomplish in a workweek- specifically, profit-generating work.

In a billable profit model, not all work is valuable- only the work you can charge for. But there is a ton of background work required to make that “valuable” work happen.

Big firms try to get around having attorneys spend time on “valueless” work like administration and organizing by hiring support staff, but there’s no way to make 100% of your time billable under this model. You’re always going to have some non billable time...

.. and the amount of non-billable work required to make billable time happen is going to vary widely from person to person. And this is especially going to be true for people with disabilities.

A person with an auditory processing disorder (like me), someone who is Deaf and needs an interpreter, or someone with a mobility disability may take longer to do things by virtue of the body they live in, which makes it harder for them to meet any normative requirement.

Most lawyers with disabilities self-select out of environments that won’t accommodate for them. (I certainly did.) But billable requirements are often difficult for non disabled or neurotypical attorneys to meet consistently without sacrificing their health or family life.

And billable requirements disadvantage other attorneys too. There are many well-documented cases of women who were passed over for partner or were laid off because they “weren’t dedicated enough” to their jobs (i.e. they had lower billables bc they were taking care of family.)

There’s not a tempting enough financial incentive for firms to reduce billable hours or reevaluate what they consider to be valuable work- firms are entitled to set essential requirements of employment, even if those requirements have damaging effects on EEs.

The thing is, though, they *could* change it if they wanted to- they’d just have to reduce their overall profit (and probably restructure as an organization.)

Imagine if firms took a more holistic approach to evaluating attorney’s contributions- they could reward innovative thinkers and reliable workers,or those who were good at producing resources that benefited the practice, even if they weren’t directly billable to the client.

What kind of attorneys would they attract and retain? What kind of results would they produce? What would overall employee retention look like? Would employees be happier?

Again, there’s no real financial motivator for firms to reduce their profits, particularly when the competition is willing to outpace you. But what if stemming the growing number of attorneys in mental health and substance abuse crisis was?

As others have noted, the workaholic attitude and substance abuse crisis isn’t limited to big firms with billables. Crim defense, govt, and nonprofit attorneys struggle with these issues due to understaffing,overwork, and high demand.

This is the other side of the capitalist coin- under resourced agencies and nonprofits learn to “make do” with minimal resources, and expect their employees to do so, too. And crim defense attorneys struggle to stem the effects of the immense carceral state.

It’s all bad. It’s all unsustainable. But the growth of billable minimums (and the fact that these are so normal that new attorneys can’t even trust their own internal judgment as to whether 2200+ reqs are “reasonable” - or even feasible!) is an undeniable factor.

(And let’s be clear- it’s not just big defense firms with these requirements. It’s plaintiff side and “progressive” firms too.)

If we truly care about attorney “wellness,” we should be working towards a profession where a newly barred attorney isn’t expected to bust their ass at 80 hours a week in order to gain any experience. (Hell, 60 hours is too much.)

Reducing attorney workloads across the board would require massive structural change to the profession. And yes, even if all firms reduced their billables overnight, it wouldn’t fix the workaholic culture of our profession.

But if leaders in the profession aren’t willing to admit the deleterious effect the pursuit of profit and creeping billable requirements has on attorneys (and the overall diversity of the profession), there’s no way we can expect this “lawyer wellness” crisis to end anytime soon.