A Matter of Minutes
January 1, 2020

     As an attorney, I think a lot about minutes.  For better or worse, many attorneys, including myself, still take the ‟billable hour‟ as their base unit for calculating the value of the time they put toward their professional service to clients.  And most attorneys I know calculate their billable  hour in six-minute increments, or in other words, one-tenth of an hour.  This makes it easier to tell how much value to attribute to smaller chunks of time. 

     For example, if a phone call takes six minutes or less, you would determine the time-value of that call as one-tenth of your billable rate.  So if your billable rate is $150.00 per hour, that phone call just cost your client $15.00.  And if the call takes more than six and up to twelve minutes – or if the call is still six minutes or less but your billable rate is $300.00 per hour -- then the client cost  for that call is $30.00.  

     That is the theory, anyway.  Most attorneys I know (myself included) track time using the billable hour, but then adjust their billing to better reflect the actual value provided to the client.  This is fuzzy territory, of course, because the ‟actual value provided to the client‟ is a highly subjective matter.  Plus, there are all sorts of reasons why the billable hour is a problematic basis for determining value of one‛s professional time in the first place.

     But that is beside my current point, which is to say that I spend an extraordinary amount of time, probably far more than most people, thinking about time.  Specifically, I think about the value of my minutes.  And I don‛t just think about my billable minutes – i.e. the time I spend substantively advancing a client‛s matter.  I think about all the other minutes too.  In my practice, I record and track all the time I spend doing the things that enable and support my substantive professional work, and which help me fulfill the unique duties which I believe are incumbent on attorneys as citizen-leaders in their communities.   I track the  time I spend on accounting and business planning.  I track the time I spend on continuing education and community service.  I track the time I spend performing pro bono legal service and in developing or screening new prospective clients or matters.  And as ridiculous as it sounds, I track the time I spend tracking my time.

     From a business perspective, the purpose of all this tracking is to help me determine whether my ratio of billable to non-billable professional time is appropriate.  And to be honest, right now, my ratio is rather out-of-whack, with non-billable time consuming an outsized number of my hours.  This causes all sorts of problems, but none of those problems are intractable.  They are problems of abundance, not of scarcity, and I can move the ratio toward a more sensible balance over time. 

     But the current imbalance occasions a much broader thought.  There are 1440 minutes in a day.  If I calculate that 440 of those should be spent on sleep (which is approximately optimal for me), that leaves me with 1000 minutes a day.  How am I spending my 1000 minutes per day? Am I maximizing the value of those minutes  – either by the metric of money or by other appropriate metrics – in all the important areas of my life, both within and beyond my law practice?  That is the question I am posing to myself in 2020.  I ask for the wisdom to make my way toward a sound and productive answer.