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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Some thoughts:

1) Assuming you must do all the pro bono work that you have, is it litigation? If so, can you recruit an additional associate to your case to share the load or have a summer associate or a staff attorney do some of the research or even first-round drafting?

2) Are you making the most of the staff and support available? Secretary, paralegals, research librarians?

3) You need to be billing for time you are working, and work is work even if you're not all bright eyed and bushy tailed. I'm sure I read and analyze faster at 9am than I do at 11pm. But I'm still billing if I stay up late to work.

4) Responding to colleagues. We also have a collegial office and people will respond to queries without billing. But this is limited to simple queries that people can answer off the top of their head. So if I know someone has recently done XYZ, I might call them with a question or two so they can point me in the right direction or confirm that my reading of XYZ requirement is same as theirs was.  But these kinds of queries shouldn't require you to actually go off and do work to formulate a response.  Is that happening, where you are going off and having to do actual research or analysis to answer such queries?[/quote]

Honestly, as a first-year, she probably doesn't have any of the type of queries you're talking about.  That's for people with more experience who actually have reasonable experience based answers to give off of the top of their heads.  If someone is asking a first-year for an answer on ANYTHING, it should be expected that the first-year will bill the time needed to get the answer.[/quote]

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