This Is Something To Look Forward To

Billable hours.

When I summered at BIGLAW and was getting used to it for the first time it made me so anxious.... You fumble around on a project feeling like a complete idiot, with time ticking away, and at the end of two and a half hours you've been down half a dozen blind alleys and have half a paragraph of tepid conclusions and realize you don't really understand what you're supposed to be doing anyway. Do you bill that 2.5 hours? On the one hand, great, 2.5 hours, that's a nice big chunk of billable time -- great! I hope this will take me a lot longer to finish up. On the other hand, you realize, someone's going to look at this piece of paper and think, "We've hired us a complete idiot! It took her 2.5 hours to do this simple project, and she's still not finished." Maybe you should only write down 1 hour. But where are you going to get the other 1.5 hours? Stay later? What if while you're trying to catch up you're only slightly less clueless?