Are you making them money? If yes, you are safe. If no, then not.

If they don't share information about billing and collections for your time, then you can do some estimating. Base case, if they collect 100% of the time you bill at your rate, would it cover your salary and overhead?

You've done your part and asked for guidance and feedback.

Worry is a misuse of imagination.

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It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev

I have never heard that quote before, but I really like it.

It’s great to bring in clients & find your own work. Doing that might solve your problem with lack of work, and you might need to learn new stuff to handle the new work.

My greatest success with bringing new work came not from “hustling” but from doing high quality work while being sensible. I had an insurance carrier shift a whole bundle of cases to me personally (as a non-partner, young associate) after I took some good depositions & wrote a solid msj. One partner told me that he had never seen an associate get cases like that before. The thing that really sent the carrier over the moon (I think) was my receipts from travel related to the depositions. I had the hotel restaurant make pb&j’s to go for my lunches. (So my receipts were like $1.50 for lunch. Lol) And I had traveled to a tiny town & walked everyday from my hotel to the depositions instead of renting a car. These were totally minor details to me, but the insurance carrier was apparently impressed because my trip was so cheap. Plus, we had the fantastic result from the msj. I had to do a lot of hand-holding for the client in that case, so that might have played a role, too.

Do great work. Don’t overbill.

Small graffiti I saw painted on a concrete walkway in a park in south Florida in March.

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It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev

It's a stripped down version of ...

"The best use of imagination is creativity. The worst use of imagination is anxiety." ~ Deepak Chopra.

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

You just ruined it for me.

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It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev

Obviously, do whatever work they want to give you, but also start acquiring your own clients. If you are making them money, you aren’t going to get let go and eventually they might make you a partner. If they don’t, once you have a base built up you can tell them to pound sand and either hang a shingle or take your client book to another firm.

Start thinking about where you want to be and what you want to be doing 3,5,10 years from now.

Demand for legal services is down in most practice areas so this isn't the best time to go looking, especially with your limited experience. You might want to see if you can piggyback your litigation experience into the insolvency area as that practice is busy and will be busy for some time.

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clm
Nashville, TN
https://twitter.com/ironclm | http://ironclm.typepad.com

We do quite a bit of eviction/foreclosure work... Waiting for this moratorium to lift.

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@floathammerholdon | @partners_in_tri

That's how my old Ad Agency ended up tanking after I was let go

While I was still there, we designers on staff did great work, to the clients specs - or better - and cheap, But then she would go off on her own and rework - not to the clients specs, but to what she could manage - and fuck it up, THEN bill the rework hours, which weren't even asked for by the client. Clients started leaving and she let me go as high-value work dried up, and she could survive on hack product

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

Billing 20 hours a week as a junior associate means something is wrong with your situation, unless it’s just a short-term consequence of the pandemic. But, if the lack of hours has a different cause, then you need to do something to fix it. We don’t know enough to say whether that means fixing it within the context of your current firm or means looking for another job. Don’t kid yourself — of course, drawing full-time pay for half-time work is a nice lifestyle for a while, but it’s not sustainable given law firm economics and your need to build your skills/experience. Sorry for the dose of bad reality. (I practiced for 35 years).

A friend of mine was feeling a little anxious, so I sent her the abridged version

She thanked me, said that was just right for her mood, and it helped a lot

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

Some good advice here already.

I'd echo what ike said - 20 hrs/week for a junior is not sustainable long term. If it's a short term lull because of the eviction moratorium you mentioned, then enjoy the breather and be ready to make up for lost time (literally) when work starts to pick up. If it's because of something about you personally that makes partners not want to delegate to you, you need to identify what the issue is and fix it pronto. If it's a general firm issue (as it may be if the last 2 associates left for lack of work), then yes, you may need to start thinking about alternatives.

2 years out of school is too early to hang out your own shingle in almost all cases, IMO. Maybe you're a superstar and have a great book of business already. But be honest with yourself about how good you really are, how much skill you actually have, how effective you will be at persuading others you have that skill based on 2 years' experience, how long you can sustain a ramp up period with low billables, etc. It's hard starting your own firm. My partner and I started our firm with combined 27 years of experience between us and it took us a couple years before we weren't kind of scared that it was all going to fall apart.

If you can get great, substantive, client-facing work at your current firm, that's wonderful. But don't be surprised if you're getting stuff that's barely above paralegal level with 1 year of private practice experience - that's often the way it goes as a junior. Not trying to be mean, but a seasoned paralegal probably knows more about your job that you do at this stage. That will change with time and it's not a reflection on you personally; it's just a function of experience. And to get that experience, you usually have to spend some time in the trenches doing the scut work.

If you can hustle for your own clients, great. My experience is that it's hard to do that at that junior a level. However, it can vary by practice area and size of firm. At the firms where I started, they wanted books of business for big VC financings, M&A deals in the $30-300M range, bet the company litigation...work no junior associate was ever going to land. If you're doing slip and fall stuff, DUI defense, basic landlord/tenant disputes, you may have an easier time building your own book at a relatively early stage.