[flowerplough]

four years. There's 9000 hours of 8 to 5 work in this time.

Given the way many, many lawyers round up each separate fraction of an hour as to "enhance" their revenue opportunities, there's probably more like 30,000 billable lawyer-hours of work in that "first four years". Such under-achieving brings to mind Geraldine Ferraro's affirmative-action-related comment. If Obama was a typical white person, his law firm probably wouldn't have kept him around very long, if he's billing less than a thousand hours per year in his busiest years.

[CharlesWayneCT]

From what I’ve read, associates in reasonably-sized law firms would be expected to charge from 2000-2400 hours a year. You can’t bill every single hour, but they certainly try.

Smaller firms don’t do as well because they don’t have as many different client to throw the associates on.