Billables measure time. Your currency defines your career.

From day one in BigLaw, you’re conditioned to see your worth in six-minute increments. You log them, chase them, and obsess over them. Bill enough, and you’re “valuable.” Miss your target, and suddenly you’re dead weight. Never mind the brilliance of your arguments, the client relationships you’ve nurtured, or the pro bono work that kept you tethered to your humanity.

Why Billables Became King

The billable hour wasn’t designed to measure your talent, intelligence, or potential. It was designed because it’s the simplest way for firms to sell time to clients.

Easy to track. Easy to invoice. Easy to compare across associates.

But what’s easy for firms has turned into a straitjacket for attorneys. Because when the only thing measured is hours, the message is clear: your value is how much time you sell, not who you are or what you bring to the table.

The Burnout Math

Billable hours were never meant to be a currency. They’re just a crude metric of productivity. But when your entire bonus, promotion track, and even sense of worth hinge on one number, the math gets toxic fast.

  • This is how attorneys end up sprinting toward targets that don’t mean anything:
  • Taking on work they don’t care about just to pad hours.
  • Canceling weekends because they’re “close” to the year-end bonus threshold.
  • Staying in firms that crush them because at least they’re hitting numbers.

Winning the billable-hours game often looks like losing everywhere else: fried relationships, hobbies that vanished years ago, and a career defined by exhaustion, not growth.

The Bigger Career Trap

Here’s the subtler danger: if hours are your only metric, you neglect the very things that build long-term success.

  • Business development? Optional. Until you realize it’s what makes you indispensable.
  • Skill-building outside your silo? Easy to ignore. Until your practice area dries up.
  • Leadership, mentoring, innovation? All pushed aside because they don’t “count” on a timesheet.

Billables keep you so busy proving your value that you forget to actually create it.

Redefining Currency

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: billables are not a currency. They’re the coins you trade to buy your real career outcomes. And those outcomes are wildly different from person to person.

  • For some, currency = autonomy.
  • For others, it’s mastery or prestige.
  • For others still, it’s flexibility, impact, or building something of their own.

When you don’t stop to define your own currency, the system will happily define it for you. Spoiler: it will always pick hours.

A Quick Reality Check

Here’s a question I challenge every attorney to ask:

If you had to define your career’s value without mentioning hours, what would you say?

If you can’t answer that right now, that’s your signal. Because the truth is, if you don’t know your own currency, you’re just letting the system dictate what matters. And the system’s only goal is to keep you billing

Where the Big Brain Assessment Comes In

This is exactly why I created the Big Brain Career Archetype Assessment. It’s designed to force attorneys to answer the question: What’s actually valuable to me?

For some, the results highlight mastery—the need to be the technical expert. For others, it’s impact, autonomy, or growth. Whatever your archetype, the point is simple: until you know your own currency, you’ll keep playing the billables game as if winning it actually matters.

And it doesn’t.

Closing Thought

So here’s your homework: take five minutes and ask yourself what you’d actually trade your hours for. Security? Growth? A shot at partnership? Or maybe just the ability to have dinner with your family three nights a week?

Because when your tombstone gets written, no one’s engraving “2,043 hours in 2025.”

If you’re struggling to answer what your value is beyond hours, you’re not alone. Most attorneys can rattle off their billing target faster than their real goals. That’s why I built the Big Brain Career Archetype Assessment — to give you an honest read on what drives you and the kind of career that matches it.

Clarity is the first step toward shifting from hours to outcomes.