P.C. Shannon

Lawyers bill their time in six-minute (one tenth of an hour) increments. Performance is judged largely on how many hours you bill in a year, and bonuses are tied to reaching some goal for billable hours—that goal is typically a very large fraction of the number of hours a normal person works in a year, sometimes more. In other words, there’s a great deal of pressure on lawyers to maximize their productivity and bill as many hours as possible. So what I saw in the bathroom today shouldn’t be much of a surprise.

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