Well this gets back to the question of the output. For the law firm itself, this might be a valid approach. For the client, though, this is a terrible way to measure productivity. At a certain point hours may even be inversely proportional to productivity (assuming the client's output is desirable legal outcomes). This works very much the same as software engineering, except that usually (ignoring the case of consulting firms) all of the work is done in-house.

But the question in the grandparent post was about capacity - and in this regard, if some customer needs "X much" of legal services performed, then it's reasonable to state that if your legal team that can devote twice as much hours to that customer, it has twice as much capacity.

Completely agreed.

What about the general counsel of an in-house legal team?

Surely they care about their underlying activities and not just number of legal hours worked, right?

I have to believe there is a legal team somewhere in the world that is measured on productivity beyond just "number of billable hours" generated.

I imagine an in-house team is being paid a salary or a retainer, in which case their work hours are moot. (Not a lawyer, so I could be wrong.)

I think the problem is the word "productivity". When we say that word, we're implicitly suggested there's a simple integer or decimal that can capture whether a person's wages are money well spent or not. For most professions, programming included, I am highly skeptical of the existence or even potential for such a number.

Sure, I wasn't disagreeing with your overall point. I was just pushing back on the last sentence:

> But lawyers? They're in the business of selling time in 15 minute increments. Their productivity is simple to measure in this respect.

I don't think all lawyers are in that business. There are plenty of in-house counsel that aren't in that business. Just as there are plenty of engineers and software developers that _are_ in the business of selling time in 15 minute increments.

I just don't think the productivity question actually breaks down along professional lines, but rather on business model lines (which, again, I think we're in agreement about your main point)

I was going to say "I didn't say all", but you're right, I didn't qualify. I meant the majority of lawyers, which I think is still accurate.

I also agree it doesn't break down along professional lines. Just used lawyers as an example, but I shoulda been clearer about my intent.

Ah, sure, makes sense. Lawyers do skew more into service providers rather than in house, so make sense as an example of that.

Can you represent all the values in an equation of two variables using only a single variable? Only if the two are completely dependent (and therefore its actually an equation of just one variable). If the 2nd variable contains any information, its an impossible ask (and therefore the worth of people can only be boiled down to "productivity" if literally every measurable dimension of worth is 100% dependent on productivity).

> I imagine an in-house team is being paid a salary or a retainer, in which case their work hours are moot

I would not call it moot, but opportunity cost - and opportunity cost is very hard to measure. Technical debt is similar.

If you have current lawsuites to handle and avoid cost, their hours are better spend doing that than dishes. If you have future law suites to avoid... that get's even more tricky.

I meant "moot" only in so far as it's a useful measure of productivity.

If the hours aren't tied to either the cost or the price, then I don't know how they can be tied to productivity in an economic sense.

> You were both right, and it all depends on your definition of productivity

Sure, but at some point, you can pick a definition that is so far removed from what was intended, that this exercise is utterly meaningless.

> Sure, but at some point, you can pick a definition that is so far removed from what was intended, that this exercise is utterly meaningless.

You could say that anytime there's any lack of clarity about what is meant by any given term,

With "productivity", you could reasonably mean any number of things.

It's not like someone said "pizza" and I said "that depends on what you mean by pizza". You could say that (is a calzone a pizza?), but it wouldn't be reasonable to do so.

In the case of productivity, I think it's reasonable to clarify what is meant.

P.S. Was your use of "utterly meaningless" an intentional pun?

> As an Engineer, I sell my time by the hour too.

As in you literally bill for hours, and the more hours you work, the more you get paid?

Most programmers that I know (which is obviously not a great metric) either get paid a salary (which is divorced from actual hours worked) or they get paid by the hour but have no say over how many hours they will. In both cases, time is independent from productivity. Therefor, there's no harm (and really only benefits) to coding efficiently.

But if you a) control how much time you work (like lawyers do, to an extent), and b) get paid for your time, then yes the incentives are setup to encourage you to be inefficient. Completely agreed.

I’m guessing they’re an independent contractor or freelancer of some sort.

Yup

And that's great! But there's a reason I used qualifiers like "most", not "all".

If you bill by the hour, there's a reasonable (but not necessarily correct or optimal) case to be made for measuring your productivity in terms of billable hours.

But it makes zero sense to do so if your hours are disconnected from the economic activity that results from your work. In such cases, it would be completely arbitrary to measure hours and call that a measure of productivity. Just as arbitrary as lines of code.

>As in you literally bill for hours, and the more hours you work, the more you get paid?

that's the way I do it.

>then yes the incentives are setup to encourage you to be inefficient.

I'm pretty sure if I was inefficient I would lose the job and thus not make as much money as I would otherwise.

Paradoxically, if you optimize for billable hours on your first job, you might never get to that highly-compensated 100th job. A selection effect of sorts.

I'm sure lawyers think they try and settle things efficiently as well.

The software engineering profession is riff with wasted work: rewrites, new bullshit services and tech, insanely complex clustering and cloud deployments, etc.

> This may explain why lawyers are motivated to stir things up, rather than settle them. They're motivated by the wrong metric

Most lawyers I know have many clients and are swamped with work. They have little incentive to "stir things up". It's similar with accountants and plumbers in my city. They aren't trying to make more work for themselves because they already have their hands full.

But in regional markets where supply isn't so constrained relative to demand then, sure, there's an incentive to make-work once you've wrangled a client, just as with any other profession.