Every year the firm’s management committee holds a meeting to update the associates on the financial position of the firm and answer any questions we might have.  There weren’t any major surprises, but one thing stood out to me:  The average associate billable hours for the past fiscal year were around 1,700.  I don’t know what other people billed, but I do know that I billed over 2,500 hours during the past fiscal year (and I have no doubt that plenty of people billed more than that).  Which means that, in order to get an average of 1,700, at least some associates must be billing next to nothing.  Even if there are other factors that I don’t know about (some of them may have been doing lots of pro bono work), that still feels a tad unfair to me.