Overbilling In Los Angeles

"Hey Tom The Temp,

Big fan of your blog! Keeping it real, man, keeping it real.

Here's one more crappy story for the Wall of Shame. Probably not the worst, by far, but I think it kind of stinks.

So I was working on an easy little project at a big Los Angeles firm. Some kind of breach of contract nonsense, really easy. Within a week, I finish two batches adding up to about 1700 documents. No big deal, right? Actually kind of a slow pace for many of the projects in L.A.

Without much warning, the project leader (another temp) gets ticked off at me. Because her friends on this deal, who came with her from a prior project, hadn't finished even their first batch, and that looked bad. Makes little sense to me, either, actually, since I would be hard-pressed to match names with faces . . . never saw much of those folks, or really cared anything about them way down at their end of the hallway.

Guess who gets let go?

LOL, apparently working up to spec at a marginally competent level gets you fired these days.

What makes it ironic is that I thought I was the lazy one . . . I mean, we're talking about assignments that had nothing but junk e-mail and review criteria along the lines of "Is it a contract? Mark it with the "contract" tag. The end." And they were handing out massive unplanned break time, every day, for computer crashes and all sorts of administrative what-have-you."

Yes, unfortunately this is all too common. Sadly, certain temporary attorneys blatantly overbill and milk the projects for all they are worth. Certain attorneys even steal hours by knowingly not working for the times they jot down. The agencies & firms know this. Sadly, quality and professionalism often times take a back seat to cheap/incompetent labor, profitability, and wide partner billing margins. Stay away from dehumanizing billing machines that skirt around the fringes of legal ethics by hiding under the banner of elite law firm name.