It’s been said with good justification that “a lawyer’s pen gets heavier during the fourth quarter.”

Invariably, as the year nears an end, lawyers (and paralegals) scramble to find things to do in their files in order to make their firm’s hourly billing “targets” (i.e., goals) for the year.

You see a lot depends upon meeting law firm billing targets including firm bonuses and partners’ shares of the profits.  It sometimes may also mean whether or not you will have a job for the next year.  Thus, it is no wonder that I have found that more make work projects and task padding also occur during the final two months of a year that at any other time in the year.

But apart from concerns about the task padding that goes on in the fourth quarter, there is another concern: time padding.  Time padding can also occur when lawyers and paralegals add time to legitimate tasks to try to make yearly billing goals.

Apart from the deliberate instances of time padding, time padding can also occur in other ways.  Inadvertent time padding can occur when lawyers go back through all their files toward the end of the year looking to see if they recorded their time (or enough time) for tasks that might have been completed months ago.  When lawyers and paralegals do this, it is called “reconstructing” their time. And as many courts and experienced legal bill auditors alike know, when lawyers and paralegals do try to reconstruct their time, they invariably rely upon a faulty memory.  This, in turn, invariably causes them to record more time rather than less time.

The other thing you may note in 4th quarter legal bills is the presence of some billers who have not previously billed in the file who are also scrambling to get in as many billable hours as they can before year’s end.  They have literally gone around the office begging others for work to do as they too need to meet the firm’s minimum billing requirements or to qualify for a bonus (or to keep their jobs).

In the parlance of bill reviewing, these drop-in billers are called “transient billers.” They are attorneys and paralegals who mysteriously drop into a case, do a little work, and then mysteriously drop out of the case.  If you do see evidence of transient billers in a bill during the 4th quarter (or at any time for that matter), you should determine the exact reason.  If the presence of additional staff cannot be justified or is done for the convenience of the firm, the billing partner should be asked to write down any additional charges applicable to using the new biller.  You should also insist that they discontinue assigning new billers to your files absent some true emergency situation or by your request.

Hopefully, you will not have any surprises in your attorney’s 4th quarter legal bills. But if you do and you do not timely address them with your attorney, then you can expect even more legal bill surprises during the course of the year.