American lawyers record their working time in tenths of an hour. The system goes back to Reginald Heber Smith, who joined the Boston firm Hale and Dorr in 1919. His timesheet was divided into six-minute units, because, he wrote, “I can more easily add, subtract, and divide on the decimal system.” The American Bar Association published his system in 1940.
Firms now set annual targets. Justice Stephen Breyer has said: “There is tremendous pressure on younger lawyers to produce 2,000, 2,200, 2,400 billable hours.” A Yale Law School estimate found that 2,200 billable hours a year require being at work 59 hours a week.