This post may contain affiliate links and Corporette® may earn commissions for purchases made through links in this post. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
Like these posts? Follow us on Twitter or Facebook — this is the edited version of what we’re reading! You can also follow us on Pinterest and Instagram, or by our RSS feed.
- Racked looks at some new trends in eyewear (and we just talked about fun glasses at work).
- Real Simple offers several dos and don'ts for bras and for dry shampoo.
- New York magazine's Science of Us shares advice from experts on getting through a workday after a night of no sleep.
- The American Lawyer talks about the possibility of transferring during law school.
- Women Lawyers News says their new Billable Hour Tool “helps you figure out, at a glance, vacation/conference/holidays, where you are with hours throughout the year, and how to better balance your time.”
- Fast Company gives you tips on returning to work at a former employer.
- A Lawyer's Life has a Q&A with Gila Jones, James Perse general counsel.
- Above the Law shares the anonymous experiences of women lawyers dealing with sexual harassment as federal employees.
- For your Laugh of the Week, Party Over Here imagines a mansplaining hotline [autoplay video].
On CorporetteMoms Recently…
- We talked about scheduling kids' playdates as a working mom.
- Kat shared some clothes for working moms, including some maternity basics and washable office clothes.
Did we miss anything? Add 'em here, or send them to [email protected]. Thank you! Also: Are you a mom or mom-to-be? Don't miss this week's news update at CorporetteMoms.
Anonymous
I looked at the video for the billable hours tool from Women Lawyers News. It doesn’t do quite what I want a tool to do. I want something where I can enter in my billable requirement for the year, enter the days I’ll be in vacation, enter the available work days, and it will tell me how many hours per day I need to bill. And it would update that daily average as I worked. So if I worked 10 hours that weekend, the average would adjust. Does anyone know about such a tool?
Sydney Bristow
I’m interested in something that does this too. I don’t have a billable requirement but I do get paid overtime above a certain number of hours per week so I have an hours goal based on how much money I want to make a year.
So far I’ve been doing it on Excel and track it weekly. I factored in vacation, holiday, and unpaid days to get a weekly billing target. Then each week I enter the hours I billed, compare it to the target, and total up how far ahead or behind I am. Some sort of app would be great.
Kate from Women Lawyers News
Hi Sydney, I haven’t advertised it that way yet, but this is a great tool for anyone trying to track hours, see more detail in my comment below if helpful. Have a great weekend!
Lyssa
This is overly simple, but the way I keep track is to just figure what I need to average per week, then keep a running total, updated weekly, of where I need to be to be at that average. Then I can figure my extra or deficit at a glance. For example, if I want 2000 hours a year, with 2 weeks vacation, that’s 40 hours a week. On week one, my goal is 40, week 10 it is 400, etc. Each week, I add 40 to the goal and the actual week’s hours (which I jot down on a sticky note each day) to the actual running tally. So, if it’s week 5 of the year, my goal is 200, maybe I have 190, so I know I need to put in some extra, or maybe I have 220, so I know I can relax a little or maybe take a day off.
Like I said, super-simple, but I’m not sure what an app could really do that would make it easier.
Anonymous
Yeah, I keep something similar on a month by month basis. Was just hoping for something to keep track without me doing the math.
Kate from Women Lawyers News
Hi there, thanks for taking the time to leave feedback, it helps me help women lawyers even more!
Good news, this tool does exactly what you’re looking for – in your comment, you actually described exactly what it does! It’s there to help people save time repeatedly doing billable hour math and projections throughout the year, just like you noted below.
You just enter your billable hour goals for the year, your number of vacation days as you described, you could then just type in 8 for the average number of billable hours per day to start and your estimated total hours for the whole year is updated as well as the amount by which you are over or under your target. You can adjust the 8 per day up or down in seconds if you see you need to bill more each day.
Right away, you’ll have a target for each day of the year! Then, every day you bill throughout the year, or every time you plan to take a day off for vacation/conference/etc., your year-end target is instantly updated. It will update your monthly total instantly too for people who like to see where they are for the month.
You can take a few minutes to set this up, but you really don’t need more than a minute. I loved having this tool in practice and people kept asking me to share it, which is why I made it available to help other lawyers.
Here’s a few of the comments I have received about this billable hour tool in case helpful: My local women’s bar newsletter surprised me with – “we love Kate’s Billable Hour Spreadsheet, a fantastic tool to track your billables—stress-free!” And purchasers nationally emailed me to say – “The spreadsheet is amazing. I used to have one back in my old government consulting days, and I have been dying for one since then. Thank you so much!” and also “Hi Kate, Thank you for putting this spreadsheet together – I can see that it will be very useful!”
Also, so glad to here so many of you are loving the content and downloads on Women Lawyers News and that it is helping you. Please feel free to reach out to me directly (http://www.womenlawyersnews.com/contact/) with any questions or comments, always appreciated.
Thanks again, have a great weekend everyone, and thanks Kat!
-Kate
MKB
Hmmm… I’m going to be doing a hackathon in another month or so – I may propose this as a thing to build over that weekend. If that’s what we end up doing, I’ll let you ladies know! (and probably hit you up for feedback on what we create!)
Anonymous
Please do!
Law School Transfers
That American Lawyer article REALLY rubbed me the wrong way. I transferred into a very elite law school that I didn’t get into the first time around (coming from a very good, but not T14 school), and I earned the cr*p out of that transfer. I got into the elite school by working my tail off and earning close to a 4.0 GPA 1L. Schools like Harvard, Columbia, and NYU take lots of transfer students because they know those are students they can count on to succeed and who will eventually wind up boosting the school’s reputation (not to mention coffers and employment statistics). Biglaw firms universally looked at the transfer as a mark of hard work and determination to be in a particular job market, not as some kind of second-tier degree.
In a bigger-picture sense, articles like this bother me because they imply that if you don’t get into your first-choice school, just go any old place and you can always transfer. It doesn’t work like that– the chances that you can actually score high enough (read: be in the top handful of people in your 1L class) to transfer are pretty small, but also impossible to predict. Everybody at my 1L school who was open about their desire to transfer early on wound up staying put. Those of us who transferred just buckled down where we were and did the best job we could. Nobody should go to a school that isn’t right for them just on the off-chance that they’ll transfer into their dream school later. Maybe it will work out, sure, but you should only be going to law school if you’re confident you will be well-placed coming out of THAT school.