u/SavetheCosmos

I’m a second-year associate who recently joined a solo practitioner. My salary is $120k plus benefits, and my minimum billable requirement is only 1,000 hours/year. My workday is basically 9–5, and there’s no bonus structure.

Doing the math, 1,000 billables comes out to roughly 3.8 billable hours/day. Even accounting for admin time, slow days, and vacations, that still seems very low for private practice.

Am I missing something? If my boss expects me to work significantly more than that, wouldn’t the billable requirement be higher? Or is this just how some solo/small firm practices operate? I want to do well and stay with this firm, but I also don’t want to work more than I need to if there’s no bonus incentive.