This Billing Time Is Killing Me

Once again it is Billathon time, and I hate hate HATE it. All you greedy associates out there who have been hitting this blog with searches hoping to find news about your hoped-for raises know exactly what I am talking about. To add insult to injury, this month I attempted to dictate my time rather than entering it myself. What a clusterfuck THAT turned out to be! It is actually harder to dictate it than it is to enter it myself, I've found. Maybe it's just because once upon a time I was a lowly legal secretary myself and I hated typing dictation so much because it was so unclear all the time, so I work very hard now to always spell everything and put in punctuation and all that crap, and then I start worrying that I left things out so I am constantly reviewing what I just dictated. Waste of time. I probably shouldn't have gotten the firm to agree to install digital voice dictation systems on my computer and my secretary's computer, huh?

Speaking of the firm, they are doing a retreat for associates but unfortunately I missed it by one year. I guess once you get to 7th year they figure you don't get to do fun things like retreats anymore. *sniffle* It ain't fair! Though the cities they are going to aren't exactly places I'm itching to visit so I'm not really complaining all that much. If it was to Vegas or Aruba or something I would be begging to be bumped back a class year.

And the word on the street, for those frantically searching for any sign of hope on the raise front, is that A&B is going to top TS and put first year salaries at $130K. Who knows if it is true or not, I am just so torn about it after what happened last time that it's really hard for me to be excited about a raise at this point. Considering that the folks at my firm in NY make $100K more than I do, I probably could be persuaded to care, but the sense that I and the associates I work with have is that this isn't something that any of us really feel like we want. Maybe we've all been around too long and have seen too much at this point, who knows. The junior associates are still giddy, at least.