My Attorney Blog

Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the winter holidays are nearly upon us. You know what that means right? Overtime!

While most people see the holidays as a time to relax and take time off to spend with family, many contract attorneys, such as myself see it as the bonus months. There will always be plenty of time to take a vacation and unwind – after the project is over. When the project is still ongoing, my commitment is to taking advantage of overtime opportunities and maxing out my available hours.

Extra Overtime For Holiday Work

Most legal staffing agencies and law firms have a policy of providing contract attorneys paid holidays. What this means is that if you come in to work on an official paid holiday such as Fourth of July or Christmas for example, you are automatically paid at the overtime rate for all hours worked that day, and all hours logged will also be applied towards the usual 40 hours for the week. Once you hit 40 hours, the usual overtime rules kick in again and you get overtime thereafter. In essence your hours worked during paid holidays are performing double duty.

I know, it sounds like I’m all about the money and like I place less importance on family time during the holidays, but you should know, there is no obligation to stay the entire day. Most agencies and firms are more lenient during those paid holidays. You can usually come in and stay for as long as you want up to the maximum allotted time to earn your automatic overtime and leave earlier than usual to be with your family. Work schedules during paid holidays are generally more flexible, and even the supervising associates are usually eager to get home soon so they frequently don’t stay the entire time.

Remember, the double bonus hours you get during paid holidays don’t come along that often. Most of them occur during the winter season so do try to take advantage. It’ll help pay for all the Nintendo Wii’s and stocking stuffers you’ll be buying when December rolls around.

Notwithstanding any perceived stigma or downside from performing temporary attorney work, there is a general perception that contract attorneys have the potential to make a lot of money within a relatively short period of time because they can work overtime hours. Yes, I think for the most part that’s true.

In a healthy job market when projects are plentiful, making a six figure income or more a year is not only possible, I would go as far as to say it is a likely occurrence. Of course, it would depend on your ability to successfully roll from one project to another. Even after factoring some downtime and gaps in between, a lucrative temp income is not out of the question.

The current recessive job market we are experiencing makes it more difficult to roll, but hitting six figures is still a very reasonable target. It simply may require more agency networking and persistence. Because the market’s a bit tight right now, you can’t passively wait for project announcements to be posted on the listservs. You need to take active initiative to bug the agencies and remind them of your availability on a routine basis.

Concept of Contract Attorney Pay As Fast Money

Interestingly, I have heard some refer to contract attorney pay as “stripper money” – categorized as the type of significant money that can be earned within a very short period of time through tasks that supposedly don’t lead to any future professional enhancement. I might disagree a bit about the latter part of that statement, but the first part is frequently true. Because most contract attorneys are paid overtime wages of time and a half for hours worked beyond 40, we are capable of earning a significant amount within a short period of time. It all depends on how many hours you are willing to put in.

I’ve worked a wide range of hours and personally have no problem with the varying project hour availabilities, but I know many contract attorneys who absolutely embrace and demand long hours. Long billable hours means more overtime and massive overtime can lead to big bucks. Many temps are frequently disappointed if not very upset when hours are cut back as such rollbacks greatly affect their bottom line.

Working 100+ Hours

I’ve had my share of long hours before and let me tell you, working that long is not easy. But at the end of each week, the resulting jackpot paycheck that greeted me was always worth it. Just don’t expect to accomplish much at home during those extreme hour weeks – this includes laundry, family time, sleep, and even personal grooming and hygiene for some people.

At the start of this year, I worked on a project that offered virtually unlimited office hours. Dinner was reimbursed up to $25 and transportation costs were covered. Working conditions were decent, associate supervision was reasonable, and internet access was not restricted. A few contract attorneys and I were separated from the main pack due to room overflow issues, so we essentially ended up with our own private room.

The members of my little posse all worked very long hours, and we took turns encouraging each other when energy and morale was low. Because our food expenses were covered and the office hours were so long, I essentially lived there for several weeks straight. I worked 5 weeks continuously, 7 days a week and racked up nearly 100+ billable hours each week. Needless to say, that one month span was my most successful contract attorney experience to date in terms of financial payoff.

I’m sure I contributed many productive hours for the client. It wouldn’t have been possible if the working conditions were oppressive. It was only possible because the agency and law firm created a commendable working environment that was ideal and conducive for extended hour work.

Extreme Hour Projects Are Rare So Take Full Advantage

There were times I wanted to just go home, but I knew such ideal overtime-heavy projects were not easy to come by so I made the effort to stick it out for the long haul. When you are on one of those kind of projects, you really need to maximize the opportunity. You have the potential to earn more than 2-3 months worth of income within a single month’s time. Contract attorney work can be occasionally unpredictable so when you have the chance to work and earn a lot of overtime in such a short burst of time, it is in your long term interest to stay the course.

I’m sure everyone has similar war stories of working those long hour projects. I hope they were good experiences.

I’m sure we all took foreign language classes when we were little. I myself took French. If I could go back in time I would have told myself not to take French. It’s not a more elegant language and besides, no one in the United States speaks it. Take Spanish instead – it’s a lot more useful.

When it comes to learning a foreign language, conventional wisdom is that you take classes in a language that is popular and spoken by many. After all, what is the point of language if you can’t find anybody to communicate with?

However, in the world of contract attorneys, conventional wisdom doesn’t always apply. So you know French and Spanish and want to do foreign language document review. Well guess what? There are plenty of individuals out there who are fluent in those two languages as well and can perform the same translation skills as you can. That is why when it comes to foreign language projects, the demand for the more common languages isn’t as high as that of the more obscure languages. Obscurity in this case doesn’t mean that no one in the population speaks it. It just means of all the fluent speakers, fewer of them are actually attorneys.

Supply and Demand Means Big Money For Asian Languages

Now if you really want to become hot commodity, you’ll need to dive into the more obscure languages – languages like Swedish or Norwegian. However, the pinnacle of in-demand foreign languages is fluency in one of the Asian languages, such as Chinese, Korean, or Japanese. If you are a native speaker and can reasonably perform legal translation in those languages, you are good as gold. The current market rate for contract attorneys who can perform Asian language document review is $50-55 an hour, with a whopping $75 per hour for overtime. It’s simple supply and demand. There are simply relatively very few contract attorneys that can speak or read any of the Asian languages. Legal staffing agencies would love not having to pay such a high rate, but they know that they wouldn’t be able to recruit any Asian language contract attorneys otherwise.

Learning a new language is difficult and the task of learning Chinese, Korean, or Japanese is probably even more insurmountably difficult. But some of you may already have a basic background or foundation in a language other than English. If you do, I encourage you to brush up on your reading comprehension and translation skills. You will be increasing your marketability not only for contract attorney projects, but also improving your employment prospects should you decide to ultimately pursue permanent employment.

For those of you up to the task, I’d suggest that you start taking classes at a local college or even performing self study through an online course like Rosetta Stone. The language skills you acquire will likely pay dividends in the future.