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Tuesday, June 24, 2014

And then back on the other hand . . .

Despite at least some negative signals in the market, there are things happening on my project that indicate that the market really is pretty tight. Since I started less than two weeks ago at the beginning of this project, two new groups of contract attorneys have been added. Also, more than 50 firm staff attorneys have been added to the review list. They probably were already on the project as floor guards, but lots of firm names have been added to the list of people who can check out batches for coding (I can see the list when I go to check out a batch in the computer system).

And today, the agency announced that there would be a $200 weekly bonus -- for the next two weeks, anyway -- for anyone who managed to work 50 hours Monday through Friday and an additional 15 hours on Saturday and Sunday. First of all, anybody who isn't working 50 hours M-F is not serious about earning a living. It is like rolling off a log to get 60 hours, and there currently are 65 hours available to work M-F. So Part 1 is a piece of cake.

Part 2 on the weekend is no more difficult. We now have 23 hours available on the weekend -- 11.5 hours each day -- since the hours expansion last week.   If you can't earn the bonus under those circumstances, then you should probably get into a different line of work.

But what does this tell us? First, it shows that the firm is feeling time pressure and does not think that the current rate of review will get things done in time. It also shows that participation this past weekend wasn't all that great. Finally, it indicates that more bodies to throw onto the fire are becoming hard to come by. Usually, if the folks you have aren't enough to get shit done in time, you add more folks. Starting to sound like that might not be an option. Bonuses like that, just for showing up, are pretty rare, especially these days. Lately, overtime in any amount has been enough to get folks to be there for pretty much every minute. I find this interesting, but I don't know yet what it means.

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