Reply to Junior associate at Big Law -- help!

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[quote=Anonymous][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] Agreed. But that's why I'm wondering if something odd is going on. Like maybe other first years are asking her questions and she feels like she has to give an answer to be collegial and goes off and researches it for them. Or maybe the askers are expecting her to bill, but because she's seen more senior people informally field queries without billing, she thinks she's not supposed to bill either.

It just seems odd to me that she's spending a noteworthy (since she noted it) amount of time dealing with questions regarding cases she's not on. That doesn't sound like typical first year experience to me. Like you said, those kind of queries don't start coming for a couple of years at least. The only thing I can think of is maybe she's getting questions on the basis of her clerkship, about the rules and practices or judges from the court she clerked on. [/quote]

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