In my mind, lawyers (individuals admitted to the Utah Bar) are either sole practitioners, partners, or employees.
Following this logic, sole practitioners don't really have an xmas bonus...
Partners basically have the same problem: X amount of money came in during the year, versus Y amount of expenses and what's left is the year's profit. Calling part of that profit 'xmas bonus' is just game playing.
Lawyers as employees get whatever xmas bonus their bosses elect, from nothing to a whole bunch.
Things like electricity and rent are built into what the firm charges clients. Copy machines are set up so that you have to enter a client number as well as a matter number for the specific project you're making copies for, and the cost of copying, even the damn paper, gets transferred to the client.
It's a huge scam. Malpractice insurance and all that good stuff is built into the per hour charge to clients. If you have to take a cab home because you worked until 2 am, and it's too late to take public transit, you use the client and matter number and submit a receipt. If you order food for the team while they work into the wee hours, the food is charged to the client and matter number.
At a large firm, associates must make a certain number of billable hours per year. Not all work yields billable hours, and sometimes partners will reduce the amount of billable hours a client pays for, but that usually doesn't affect the number of billable hours one works unless the associate has a tendency to over bill. Then it looks like the associate is trying to game the system, and that's not a good thing.
Some firms count pro bono work as billable hours. Some don't. The pro bono work is for cases the firm has accepted and is working and usually not pro bono work a person finds on their own.
So let's say that a 1st year associate makes ~150K/year and the minimum billable hours is 2K. The bonus they may or may not get is commensurate with the amount a billable hours they worked for the last calendar year. IOW, it's not a holiday bonus. There's usually a bonus for hitting your hours and larger ones for exceeding them. They can range from $10K to much more. The question is how much money did the associate bring to the firm?
As far as partners go, it depends on whether it's an eat what you kill firm (i.e. a partner gets more money based on how much work s/he brings in) or one where partners share an equal percentage of the profits.
Above the Law used to keep track of firms and their bonuses as well as base pay for associates. If you have a particular firm in mind, you might start there.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/04/2019 01:23PM by Beth.
Okay, Bethie, now you're getting close to the classic joke about the 45-year-old law firm partner who is called to meet his maker. When he meets St. Peter, he complains to him, "Why did I have to die now?! Things were going so great!!"
St. Peter responds, "Hey, you're over a hundred years old! How much more could you have expected?"
The lawyer says, "Are you crazy?! I'm only 45!!!"
St. Peter then says, "What! According to the hours you've billed all your clients, you have to be at least 103!"
Another 'billing trick' is to leave the office to take care of three things, one on each of three different cases, and your total mileage and travel time is 54 miles and 1.5 hours is billed to each case.
And your minimum increment of billing might be 15 minutes, so you can make/take four phone calls in 15 minutes real-time but end up billing an hour for the firm.
Yes, driving time and thinking about cases when you're on the pot and maybe when you're dreaming at night.
We had these bizzaro timers/clocks we were supposed to use to keep track of how much time we were working on each case. So you could have four or more matters you've been assigned, and you would switch between them on the clock, pausing one timer and starting another. Well, I forgot the start/stop business and reverted to the tried and true sticky on the red rope for the claim.
Memories, of the shit job I used to have...
Maybe when I retire (if I retire?), I'll set up a solo practice primarily for low-income folks. No litigation. Litigation is not my thing. I was hired during the dot com boom, and I was working in the corporate finance group the two summers before I graduated. After I graduated, they dropped my arse in litigation because the dot com bubble had burst. Gah!
I'd think it were a nightmare if I weren't still paying my student loans. Good times.
I am thinking of invoicing my brothers for the nursing care I gave my TBM parents when my brothers were too busy working to care. They think they are really good mormon. I didn't log my hours, so I will have to estimate.
I’ll never forget running into an associate that worked for a bunch of Mormons a few days after Christmas. He’d been to see a movie by himself and we bumped into each other. And he said, you were right – they’re just a bunch of greedy bastards. And he was Mormon himself.