Gender Gaps in Performance - male associate lawyers bill 10% more hours and bring in twice the new revenue as female lawyers: Evidence from Young Lawy

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

So the judge also keeps male and female lawyers equally from overbilling their clients? The paper you cited did indicate that male lawyers overbill more...

But anyway, the paper is using 2 financials only to determine performance. I think success in the courtroom is a better measure.

It said nothing of the sort.

Did you read the paper?

It said they get 10% more billable hours, which is mostly accomplished by staying longer hours and working on more cases. You do realize that most law firms create a time budget for each case? If you spend too long on your part of the case that's a bad thing.

You do realize that the numbers are fluffed up, right?

Did you read the full paper or just the abstract?

 

[Axulus]

It said nothing of the sort.

Did you read the paper?

It said they get 10% more billable hours, which is mostly accomplished by staying longer hours and working on more cases. You do realize that most law firms create a time budget for each case? If you spend too long on your part of the case that's a bad thing.

You do realize that the numbers are fluffed up, right?

Did you read the full paper or just the abstract?

I read the full paper. Please quote the part where it said men are fluffing up their hours more than women or working slower to get more hours or that they overbill more often. You are imagining things that aren't there.

And need I remind you that this is data for associate lawyers (and not the partners that send the final bills to the clients)? If they "fluff" up their hours, that is a NEGATIVE thing for the lawfirm and for their careers, it means they are working too slowly and they will get negative marks against them for it. If anything, the pressure is to report fewer hours than you actually spent and work for more hours overall, so that you get your part done seemingly under budget and the credit that comes with that (although if it is obvious you come in early and stay late, yet your combined billable and non-billable hours don't reflect that, you'll raise suspicion).

 

[Bronzeage]

An account of a real conversation with a lawyer.

Lawyer: You charged me five hours labor, but you did the job in three hours.

Me: Yeah, pretty good, huh.

Lawyer: No, it's not pretty good. I should only have to pay for three hours.

Me: That's not the way it works. The job pays five hours and I did it in three.

Lawyer: But you didn't work five hours.

Me: Nobody said I did, but you still pay five hours.

Lawyer: What do you think would happen if I tried to do that?

Me: You might go to prison, but you'd probably just get disbarred.

Lawyer: So why can you get away with it and I can't?

Me: Because I can work on cars and you can't.

 

[Toni]

An account of a real conversation with a lawyer.

Lawyer: You charged me five hours labor, but you did the job in three hours.

Me: Yeah, pretty good, huh.

Lawyer: No, it's not pretty good. I should only have to pay for three hours.

Me: That's not the way it works. The job pays five hours and I did it in three.

Lawyer: But you didn't work five hours.

Me: Nobody said I did, but you still pay five hours.

Lawyer: What do you think would happen if I tried to do that?

Me: You might go to prison, but you'd probably just get disbarred.

Lawyer: So why can you get away with it and I can't?

Me: Because I can work on cars and you can't.

Ok, but why tell that you got the five hour job done in three hours if you're charging for the five?

 

[Bronzeage]

An account of a real conversation with a lawyer.

Lawyer: You charged me five hours labor, but you did the job in three hours.

Me: Yeah, pretty good, huh.

Lawyer: No, it's not pretty good. I should only have to pay for three hours.

Me: That's not the way it works. The job pays five hours and I did it in three.

Lawyer: But you didn't work five hours.

Me: Nobody said I did, but you still pay five hours.

Lawyer: What do you think would happen if I tried to do that?

Me: You might go to prison, but you'd probably just get disbarred.

Lawyer: So why can you get away with it and I can't?

Me: Because I can work on cars and you can't.

Ok, but why tell that you got the five hour job done in three hours if you're charging for the five?

Auto repair jobs are assigned an average time value based on actual time studies of experienced mechanics. When a mechanic has performed the repair many times , he develops techniques which are more efficient and saves time. It was rare to beat the time by 40%, but I was an driveability technician(once called the tune-up man). The jobs I did included time for testing and diagnosis. My diagnostic skills were very good and I usually knew what was wrong before I started work. It was not unusual for me to make 11 to 15 hours in a 9 hour work day.

If something went wrong and my 5 hour job took 6 hours, I still got 5 hours.

I once worked with a transmission man who could remove a transmission from a car, disassemble it and repair it, and reinstall it in less than 5 hours. The job paid 10 hours. He worked non-stop without a break and not a single wasted motion. He could do 2 a day. The truly amazing thing was his failure rate was almost zero.

If lawyers were paid like mechanics, they would get paid the same, no matter how many hours they worked, and have to do the appeals for nothing.

 

[fromderinside]

So many posts and responses begin with I know person or people who are whatever for an OP that starts with am abstract of study which purports to show evidence.

The responses fit the OP in that they are mostly evidence free. I'd like to change the course of this thread by providing the full study, then making a few comments on its merits based on its design.

The study: Gender Gaps in Performance: Evidence from Young Lawyers http://repositori.upf.edu/bitstream/handle/10230/19885/1300.pdf?sequence=1‎

My take is the so called principle factors were developed by those performing the study and not through some rationale, then application of methods to data, to 'find' those factors, that the data analyzed is descriptive to which models were applied with, from my view, mainly hand waved variables. Giving those weaknesses the study id fairly well documented, the reference material is pretty standard stuff in the profession.

There is enough meat in the study that, if used by participants, could lead to a very robust analytic discussion among participants. Perhaps .... it sure would be a lot better than personal testimony. Creds to Bronzeage though.

 

[Bronzeage]

So many posts and responses begin with I know person or people who are whatever for an OP that starts with am abstract of study which purports to show evidence.

The responses fit the OP in that they are mostly evidence free. I'd like to change the course of this thread by providing the full study, then making a few comments on its merits based on its design.

The study: Gender Gaps in Performance: Evidence from Young Lawyers http://repositori.upf.edu/bitstream/handle/10230/19885/1300.pdf?sequence=1‎

My take is the so called principle factors were developed by those performing the study and not through some rationale, then application of methods to data, to 'find' those factors, that the data analyzed is descriptive to which models were applied with, from my view, mainly hand waved variables. Giving those weaknesses the study id fairly well documented, the reference material is pretty standard stuff in the profession.

There is enough meat in the study that, if used by participants, could lead to a very robust analytic discussion among participants. Perhaps .... it sure would be a lot better than personal testimony. Creds to Bronzeage though.

Thank you. I appreciate it very much.

Most of our impressions of what lawyers do are created by TV dramas, and like everything else on TV, it's not a good reflection of reality. The reality of legal work is most of it is corporate law, which means a lawyer is working to insure his client is not violating the law(reading contracts to be sure the terms would hold up in court), or determining what to do when the client has violated the law.

It's really difficult to measure this kind of work. Researching old cases on a legal database looks a lot like browsing profiles on Ashley Madison, unless you are looking over the lawyer's shoulder. Studies of lawyers and their billable hours are suspect by their very nature, because the person who documents the hours, benefits the most from them, an often never has to show anything for his work.

 

[fast]

Oye. My experience is that partners, or other senior attorneys at law firms, come in all varieties - assholes and gentleman (they're mostly men). I mean, every profession has its assholes and gentlemen. There's nothing unique in the law about that.

As to the OP, without reading the study, I would assume from experience that the authors evaluated civil (as opposed to criminal law) firms representing insurance companies and corporate clients in defense matters. This is typically where the billing model is employed. The model is less applicable to criminal defense, family law, or plaintiff's work. Getting to the top, i.e., exceeding billable hour expectations, is tough and requires sacrificing family time. Perhaps this is why male associates outperform female associates. Though maybe male associates are simply more aggressive in churning the file than their female counterparts.

Being honest and not harming others to get a desired legal outcome puts massive limits on profit making in the law profession. The truth will only occasionally be on your side, and will rarely justify the largest possible payout. Consistent victories, and the largest settlements requires unethical dishonesty and knowingly harming others and undermining the integrity of the justice system for personal gain. Thus, yes, the best for-profit lawyers tend to be terrible people willing to engage in such actions on a constant basis, which essentially requires a near-pathological lack of conscience.

Oh come on, we need a little dishonesty in our blood to produce the results necessary to offset the unfair advantage of truly immoral behavior. If one becomes so principled that they cannot in good conscious do any wrong (for instance, moderate financial harm to those that will suffer but not substantially so), then they're allowing integrity to stand in the way of superior results. That's not to say there shouldn't be integrity laced amidst our slippery deeds, but when it comes to willfully lacking some integrity, let's not forget: everything in moderation.

Haha

 

[AthenaAwakened]

I read the abstract. Before I read further, may I ask, does the report at any juncture mention anything about cases won or lost?

 

[Metaphor]

I read the abstract. Before I read further, may I ask, does the report at any juncture mention anything about cases won or lost?

It's hard to imagine female lawyers have time to win cases, what with the lipstick applicating, braiding each other's hair and talking about boys.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

I read the full paper. Please quote the part where it said men are fluffing up their hours more than women or working slower to get more hours or that they overbill more often. You are imagining things that aren't there.

"female lawyers are less likely to report “overbilling” clients" (page 3).

Are you sure you read the full paper?

Later on page 9

Others remark that measuring performance based on hours billed may induce associate lawyers to overbill clients. Law firms’ short-term revenues could benefit from overbilling practices; however, partners also have incentives to control billing abuses due to competition between law firms, the fear of losing clients, reputational and ethical concerns and potential punishment.16

So the authors handwave away overbilling, but data does show it exists. I will add that there are quite a lot of things in economics where sellers can charge higher than the worth of a good or service. These are known things, but if you start by assuming the free market fixes everything to its "proper" value and by assuming that self-policing solves all problems, you won't find such known things.

Again on page 24:

First, we explore gender differences in overbilling behavior. Table A.2 shows that female lawyers are four percent more likely to select this reason as a difficulty in meeting billable-hours requirements than male lawyers. Female lawyers may be less willing than their male colleagues to overbill clients.

Emphasis added. The authors go on to handwave this observation away because of self-policing and estimates that it does not impact the gender gap.

Whether or not the authors conclude that overbilling is an issue that contributes to the gender gap is not the point here. The point is that there actually IS a gender difference and you claimed that I was "imagining things" and that you read the full paper.

How is that possible?

 

[SimpleDon]

Abstract: This paper documents and studies the gender gap in performance among associate lawyers in the United States. Unlike other high-skilled professions, the legal profession assesses performance using transparent measures that are widely used and comparable across firms: the number of hours billed to clients and the amount of new client revenue generated. We find clear evidence of a gender gap in annual performance with respect to both measures. Male lawyers bill ten percent more hours and bring in more than twice the new client revenue than do female lawyers. We demonstrate that the differential impact across genders in the presence of young children and differences in aspirations to become a law firm partner account for a large share of the difference in performance. We also show that accounting for performance has important consequences for gender gaps in lawyers’ earnings and subsequent promotion. Whereas individual and firm characteristics explain up to 50 percent of the earnings gap, the inclusion of performance measures explains a substantial share of the remainder. Performance measures also explain a sizeable share of the gender gap in promotion.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2673619

My my, what misogynists the authors of the paper are:

There is nothing at all surprising about this result. The question of which attorney to hire by client companies is almost always made in the highest levels of a company. These levels are still overwhelmingly older and male.

And the attorneys who book the most clients, who book the best heeled clients are able to book the most number of hours.

It says much more about misogyny of clients than it does about the capabilities of male attorneys compared to female ones.

My daughter-in-law is an IP attorney. She just returned to work after a four month maternity leave. (I have pictures of my new now nearly five month old grandson if you want to see them.) This is another reason that females, especially young ones, book fewer hours than males. She will book 33% fewer hours this year because she had a baby, not because she is less capable than the male associates.

There is no question that my daughter was hired by her current firm because of her success at signing up companies that are run by women and her clients of such companies that came with her, after a suitable time and vetting for conflicts of interests of course.

But she has discovered another bias of potential clients that she can exploit to her and her firm's benefit. Tech startups are run for the most part by younger people who are not at all concerned about the gender of their attorneys. But they also are usually run by engineers who have a definite preference to hiring attorneys who have an engineering background. And my daughter-in-law has a chemical engineering degree from Georgia Tech.

 

[SimpleDon]

So, and this might just be me going out on a limb here, but sample bias might have more than a little something to do with that result. It is not hard to imagine a world where the already questionable act of being a for-profit lawyer (of any kind) is an act of anything other than engaging in a career of using the letter of the law to defeat its spirit. It makes me wonder if it doesn't ultimately stem not in a difference of cognitive ability, but rather a difference in collective ethical models.

In short, it makes me wonder if women are less enthusiastic about being for-profit lawyers because for-profit lawyers tend to be terrible people.

I don't think it has anything to do with cognitive ability but rather ambition and competitiveness and willingness to endure the sacrifices it takes to outperform others (for example, regular 60+ hour work weeks, attending networking events routinely, maybe additional willingness to bullshit to bring in new clients?). The paper itself discusses the differences in the presence of young children (meaning the is a gender difference in willingness to endure the sacrifices and not be there as much for the children between men and women) and the differences in aspirations to become a partner are large contributory factors.

Or it might be due to the misogyny of the people who hire attorneys. Who are still overwhelmingly older males.

Also, do you have evidence that partners at law firms tend to be terrible people?

Successful attorneys are alpha A types. β to Ω types are always going to be either attracted or repulsed by A types, there seems to be no middle ground. We seem to have an example of the latter here.

There are more A type males than A type females in our society. It is a cultural thing I think. In this regard, I think that it does explain some of the disparity between the genders here for attorneys. But while an A type male might have an advantage signing clients, in my extensive experience with lawyers, it is a hindrance when it comes to the attorney's work. Completely boiled down, when you hire an attorney you are hiring someone to be guaranteed to tell you the truth without regard for their own interests.

The very last thing that you want is an attorney who is basing their advice on what is better for them, not you. This would be a sure case for disbarment. This would be a terrible person who is a lawyer. And is much more likely if they are A types.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Auto repair jobs are assigned an average time value based on actual time studies of experienced mechanics. When a mechanic has performed the repair many times , he develops techniques which are more efficient and saves time. It was rare to beat the time by 40%, but I was an driveability technician(once called the tune-up man). The jobs I did included time for testing and diagnosis. My diagnostic skills were very good and I usually knew what was wrong before I started work. It was not unusual for me to make 11 to 15 hours in a 9 hour work day.

If something went wrong and my 5 hour job took 6 hours, I still got 5 hours.

This seems rather silly. If it winds up being the same rate regardless of time spent, why charge in terms of time spent? Why not just tell the customer it is a flat fee of $x for this and $y for that?

 

[Rhea]

Auto repair jobs are assigned an average time value based on actual time studies of experienced mechanics. When a mechanic has performed the repair many times , he develops techniques which are more efficient and saves time. It was rare to beat the time by 40%, but I was an driveability technician(once called the tune-up man). The jobs I did included time for testing and diagnosis. My diagnostic skills were very good and I usually knew what was wrong before I started work. It was not unusual for me to make 11 to 15 hours in a 9 hour work day.

If something went wrong and my 5 hour job took 6 hours, I still got 5 hours.

This seems rather silly. If it winds up being the same rate regardless of time spent, why charge in terms of time spent? Why not just tell the customer it is a flat fee of $x for this and $y for that?

Because the book of rates is published in hours and people can look it up on line. You publish your hourly rate and then you tell them how many mechanic-hours that job is. Then they look it up online to see if you're telling the truth.

The published rates usually look something like this:


Labor Rate = $45/hr
If you watch = $60/hr
If you tried to work on it yourself before you brought it to me = $90/hr

 

[AthenaAwakened]

So the OP isn't about the performance of the lawyers at all (how they actually handle cases and client satisfaction), but how men charge more money that women?

 

[Bronzeage]

Auto repair jobs are assigned an average time value based on actual time studies of experienced mechanics. When a mechanic has performed the repair many times , he develops techniques which are more efficient and saves time. It was rare to beat the time by 40%, but I was an driveability technician(once called the tune-up man). The jobs I did included time for testing and diagnosis. My diagnostic skills were very good and I usually knew what was wrong before I started work. It was not unusual for me to make 11 to 15 hours in a 9 hour work day.

If something went wrong and my 5 hour job took 6 hours, I still got 5 hours.

This seems rather silly. If it winds up being the same rate regardless of time spent, why charge in terms of time spent? Why not just tell the customer it is a flat fee of $x for this and $y for that?

It's just an accounting method. A job is rated for a certain hours and tenths of an hour. The mechanic has a pay rate per hour. His pay is not the clock time on the job, but his pay rate times the job time. The customer is given the price of the job, which is sum of parts, labor, and other charges.

This makes it possible to give a customer an reliable estimate.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It's just an accounting method. A job is rated for a certain hours and tenths of an hour. The mechanic has a pay rate per hour. His pay is not the clock time on the job, but his pay rate times the job time. The customer is given the price of the job, which is sum of parts, labor, and other charges.

This makes it possible to give a customer an reliable estimate.

And it means the mechanic can't pad the bill by working slow.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

It's just an accounting method. A job is rated for a certain hours and tenths of an hour. The mechanic has a pay rate per hour. His pay is not the clock time on the job, but his pay rate times the job time. The customer is given the price of the job, which is sum of parts, labor, and other charges.

This makes it possible to give a customer an reliable estimate.

And it means the mechanic can't pad the bill by working slow.

Sure they can. They can also tell you there is something wrong with your car that isn't there. If you get a second opinion you may find out they were screwing you over. I went to a car place like that to get my car fixed and 3 days later I saw them on the news for being in trouble for making stuff up.

ETA: also regarding lawyers, I had retained a lawyer who was screwing me over on prices, too. Retainer was non-refundable allegedly. I went and got a different lawyer, asking the first lawyer for an invoice. The first lawyer charged me $2500 for a phone call and a meeting they internally had regarding strategy. When I got all my paperwork, there was no such meeting in the records. The second lawyer was way more reasonable on prices and did not rip me off.

 

[Bronzeage]

And it means the mechanic can't pad the bill by working slow.

Sure they can. They can also tell you there is something wrong with your car that isn't there. If you get a second opinion you may find out they were screwing you over. I went to a car place like that to get my car fixed and 3 days later I saw them on the news for being in trouble for making stuff up.

A lawyer would never do such a thing, I'm sure. Or a Dentist, either.

I'm sure there is at least one dishonest mechanic, somewhere in the world. As with any professional service, there will always be a difference of opinion. A skilled auto technician will write an estimate for the repairs he knows will fix the problem. Another mechanic may think the problem can be repaired with a smaller repair, at a lower cost.

One thing is certain. When it turns out the lesser repair was not sufficient, no one remembers you were trying to save them a little money. The smart business move is usually to do the additional work at no charge.

Mechanics face a lot of resentment from people. It's part of the business. Some people just don't like having to put out money for car repairs. They see their car as a critical part of their life, like food and water, and car repairs are a threat like a burglar. It doesn't help when someone they view as a menial worker is taking their money.

This is a little strange in a time when a person can bring their car to a shop because the windows won't roll down and the problem turns out to be a programming error.