Most of us look forward to retirement as a time to rest, relax and enjoy the fruits of our long years of hard work.
For U.S. Senior District Judge Wesley Brown and Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Joseph Woodrough, retirement was never a word in their vocabulary.
Brown recently surpassed Woodrough as the nation’s longest and oldest sitting federal judge, dying at the age of 104 on Monday.
As lawyers, we judge one another based on our billable rates. The amount of money a client is willing to pay for our time not only affects how other lawyers view us, it affects how we perceive ourselves. It's a little twisted.
Most BigLaw practitioners accept billable hours at the standard by which lawyers are paid. Accordingly, lawyers spend hours each year refining their days into six-minute increments to quantify their work to clients. Even with that miniscule unit of measure, attorneys are forced to choose between billing tiny tasks and short phone calls for a full six minutes, or giving away their time and falling behind their billable hours. Once the initial months of post-law school idealism pass, most choose to bill the time.
