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Running fast in the wrong direction
The interviews
During his first year of law school, he interviewed with partners at big firms. Asked what life at the firm was like, they pointed to the big office and the important work. Asked about family, hours, and relationships, their answers alternated between having no relationships that matter, thinking relationships don't matter, and doing the best they could with the small amount of time they had.
The billable hour
He could not see a path to a good relationship with a wife, a family, or friends inside big-firm law. The incentive there is to work and bill as many hours as possible, so the billable hour becomes the metric for measuring an entire life. That completely distorts a person's worldview.
Direction before speed
A person who is good at running can sprint in the wrong direction and end up farther from where they wanted to go. The question that comes before running is where the runner is trying to go.
Where did the billable hour come from?
Law firms began tracking attorney time in increments in the early twentieth century. In 1958, the American Bar Association published a report titled The 1958 Lawyer and His 1938 Dollars that urged lawyers to record their hours in order to understand their costs. Hourly billing became the standard at large firms in the decades that followed.
Why does a metric distort a whole life?
British economist Charles Goodhart observed in 1975 that any statistical regularity used for control tends to break down once pressure is placed on it. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern restated the idea in 1997: a measure that becomes a target stops being a good measure. The principle is now known as Goodhart's law and appears in studies of schools, hospitals, and corporations.
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