After Wedding, an Associate's Overbilling Leads to a Suspension
A former Faegre Baker Daniels associate's law license was suspended for nine months after she inflated or fabricated time entries worth nearly $40,000 to meet a billable hour expectation. Inexcusable, sure. But an expert said it is symptomatic of the pressure Big Law lawyers face to meet hourly requirements.
August 24, 2017 at 06:08 PM
26 minute read
The original version of this story was published on The American Lawyer
Mary Jaclyn Cook spent nearly two weeks last December in Hawaii, getting married and honeymooning in the Pacific paradise. All the while, she knew she was short on hours.
At the end of November, the then second-year associate with Faegre Baker Daniels in Denver was 368 hours shy of the firm's annual 1,850-hour expectation for associates. Work had been slow in the Rocky Mountain outpost's product liability practice, and wedding planning had taken its toll. A November meeting with her boss had failed to quell Cook's fear that she would be fired if she missed the target.
On Jan. 3, 2017, when time logs were due, Cook wrote 60 entries totaling 135.7 hours. Thanks to the help of a December in which she billed more than 12 hours every day, despite her travel, Cook managed to end the year about an eight-hour workday over her firm's expected hours for associates.
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