Page 349 - WhyAsInY

Do a JoB—Harvey tHe litiGator
Which brings me back to what many believe to be the most impor- tant thing in the practice of law: the first person to whom I was taken when I arrived at the twentieth floor of 575 Madison on Tuesday morn- ing was “Gussie,” of the Accounting Department. It was her job to initiate me into the world of timekeeping. I still proudly possess my first Rosenman “time ticket,” which was handwritten, accounted for 7.00 hours, said “Yom Kippur,” and carried the code 9999-001, which meant “Vacation or Holiday.” By the time of my retirement in 2008, a matter number had eight digits, not seven, for each case or transaction, which didn’t necessarily mean that business was better then, just that there was more of it; and the New York office of the firm had grown from about fifty attorneys to more than two hundred. When I started, each attorney was responsible for accounting for a minimum of seven hours for every weekday, and time occurred in fifteen-minute segments. When, years later, the minimum daily requirement was increased to eight hours, however, billable work and, therefore, revenues magically increased as well. A few years after that, the quarter hour gave way to the tenth (as it did in most New York City firms), and everyone was then required to think about and to record their hours in six-minute intervals, a practical impossibility yet something that everyone nevertheless managed to do. So, revenues increased again.
While billing on the basis of time spent, rather than on the basis of, say, quality or results, played an enormous and very negative part in the culture of the law firms, especially much later in my career, I mention it now only because it was the first new skill that was taught to me at Rosenman and because I want to get the subject that virtually all law- yers hate acknowledged and dispensed with. Suffice it to say that I never felt any pressure to bill huge numbers of hours in the first fifteen years or so of practice. Not only were the lawyers at Rosenman highly quali- fied, they were highly professional in their approach. They, and I, worked long hours to get the work done and done well, and did not pay atten- tion to racking up hours, as lawyers in firms do now.
In those days, lawyers arrived at the office at about 9:30 a.m. They went out for a hamburger at lunchtime or ate with friends in a confer-
• 331 •