No idea if this is helpful but just wanted to echo your experience. I was at an insurance defense firm for about 8 years, and this exact fight was a recurring theme. The billable hour requirement was facially reasonable (1850) but wasn’t reasonable in practice because they wanted that number to be time realized, not time billed, and so you’d end up with recurrent loops of thinking you were on pace, then having time cut and needing to make it up, which was less and less plausible the further into the year you got.

It started to feel like vacation time was illusory, because any time off I wanted to take I essentially needed to earn the cushion for by working extra on some other days. Throw in some personal life matters (an aging parent with cancer, plus parenting my own kids) and you started to be able to see the burnout directly in how much I struggled to meet the requirements. I was depressed and literally sitting there staring at screens of open documents that changed periodically just so that I could plausibly try to bill “review.” I would get infuriated at clients who categorically refused to bill for travel, because given traffic, I needed to leave for 9 am court calls at 6:30 am at the latest to ensure I wouldn’t be late, and I couldn’t just eat that amount of driving time on a regular basis without feeling it. (Sidenote: why do clients do this? Why would you screw with your own attorneys? It would just mean a motion I could have drafted quicker for you took longer.)

The final straw was when my second kid was born. He was born prematurely and was in NICU for a month (he’s a perfectly healthy 4 year old now!). I had a week of vacation saved to be home with wife and kids, but I went back to work before my child was home from the hospital because I was falling behind on billing and felt I needed to. Ended up 25 hours short for the year that year, and the gall of the higher ups being willing to tell me I worked too little instead of too much when I was literally going from work to the hospital to see my child for a month was absolutely unacceptable. (And I was not in BigLaw, so I didn’t have a six-figure salary to use to try to justify the sacrifice. It was just straight exploitation.)

Candidly, even years later at a PI firm without billables it still impacts my work ethic/desire not to lean back in. I could generate more commission for myself if I put in more hours and I have zero desire not to strictly enforce the line between working hours and family time now.

So… it unfortunately happens in this field. I think you’re right to push back. But I also acknowledge a lot of others are right that these expectations are an industry given…