SUSTAINABLE AND BILLABLE -  Reed Smith is allowing its fee-earners across the firm to record time spent on sustainability projects as billable hours, as part of a wider environmental plan, Law.com International’s Habiba Cullen-Jafar reports. In a firm announcement on Tuesday, it said all timekeepers will now be able to annually designate up to 25 hours of work and activities related to sustainability projects as billable time. Activities that fall under the ‘sustainability project’ bracket could include attending workshops, organizing sustainability related meetings or joining other external sustainability partnerships, such as the Net Zero Lawyers Alliance. The new program builds on the firm’s current policy of allowing lawyers to devote 140 hours of non-billable development to activities such as pro bono services, innovation projects and “on-the-job” tasks that would not normally be billed to a client. In January 2021, the firm had already expanded its billable-hours credit so all timekeepers could devote 50 of these 140 hours to diversity-related projects.

WHAT YOU SAID

“COVID-19 has been such a scary time for all of us, and I realized that there are some problems that are too large for me alone to figure out how to solve. Finding additional support to deal with the collective trauma has been critical to my well-being.”

— Sheila Adams, partner at Davis Polk in New York City, on coming to the realization that mental health is “paramount.”

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