Reprimanded for Inadequate Billable Time
Hey everyone, I am a practice assistant at a large firm that mainly assists paralegals and at times, attorneys. I mainly handle print jobs, research, and document management. This is my first office job, and I’ve been here for almost a year now.
Recently, I was reprimanded at work for not having enough billable time. We hit quite a lull over the winter/spring with very little court activity; I had an average of like, 30 billable hours a month... yeah.
What I am having a hard time wrapping my head around is workload management. During this time, I was sending out emails, messages, and meeting with the paralegals in the office in person looking for work. Despite this, no one really had anything because they had just enough work for themselves to meet goals.
In March, my supervisor met with me to talk about this and after a couple weeks I was able to find some regular work. Thats also really the last time I spoke to my supervisor in person; things have been entirely hands off since then.
I’ll be honest, I’m frustrated. Meeting with my boss and my boss’ boss during our meeting about my performance I felt unheard and incompetent. For example, they criticized the accuracy of my work based on earlier projects done for my boss prior to training, and a typo from over a month ago when I wrote “202” instead of “2026”.
Is this normal in the industry/professional world, or
am I being sensitive? The feedback I have received from the attorneys and paralegals I’ve worked with has been positive, but it seems they weren’t asked their opinions before the meeting. Admittedly, I feel extra sore about all of this because I applied for a position in another one of our offices in mid-April and haven’t heard a peep, and I feel like this has really sunk my chances.
Additionally, I’m hoping to go to law school in the next year, and it now almost feels like I’ve wasted the last year trying to boost my resume and experience with this position at a notable firm.
TLDR: Is it my fault for not sourcing work for myself? How can I turn this around? TIA