Boutique Law Firms

This Firm Is Reducing Its Billable Hours Requirements To Improve Work-Life Balance

What is your firm doing to prevent attorney burnout?

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Last spring, Biglaw firms were offering their associates goodies in the name of recruitment and retention. Things up for grabs included piles of special bonus cash and additional perks like free food, up to $15K for any purchase toward rest, recreation, and relaxation, and a curated selection of high-end items and experiences. Those special thank-you gifts recently made a big return, with some firms offering cash to be to be spent away from work, and others offering vacation time (on top of existing vacation time).

While other firms have been attempting to keep associates from burning out on the job by plying them with these special gift rewards and cash incentives, one firm has actually decided to reduce the cause of associate burnout in the first place: their billable hours requirements.

Litigation boutique Sanford Heisler Sharp — a firm you may remember as one of the very first to require COVID-19 vaccination for all attorneys and staff — notified associates over Labor Day weekend that the firm would be reducing their annual billable requirements by 240 hours. Here’s an excerpt from the memo that was sent by chairman David Sanford (available in full on the next page):

As you know, we have raised salaries across the board by $10,000.00, effective September 1, 2021.  And we will proceed with your scheduled annual raises on January 1, 2022.  In addition, we will provide end of the year bonuses in December, yearly bonuses we have given every year since the Firm’s founding in 2004.

We are also reducing, effective immediately, our yearly minimum of 2160 hours (which includes all administrative and professional development time) to 1920.  Thus, the monthly numbers are reduced from 180 to 160.  The reduction in yearly minimum hours is made to give you more free time, more time with family, and more time generally out of work.  We made a commitment to you two years ago to reduce your workload and we have succeeded, as evidenced in the attorney numbers for 2021.  This commitment is now formalized by our new hourly requirement and will apply retroactively to January 1, 2021.

Sanford Heisler’s slimmed-down hourly requirements apply to both associates and partners. Congratulations to everyone at the firm.

When working from home for such an extended period of time, the line between work life and home life can become extremely blurry, and a sense of work-life balance can easily fade away. That said, what is your firm doing to combat attorney burnout during these unprecented times?

Please email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Work-Life Balance”) or text us at (646) 820-8477. We always keep our sources on stories anonymous. There’s no need to send a memo (if one exists) using your firm email account; your personal email account is fine. If a memo has been circulated, please be sure to include it as proof; we like to post complete memos as a service to our readers. You can take a photo of the memo and attach as a picture if you are worried about metadata in a PDF or Word file. Thanks.

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Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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