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Would love to hear other stories from other lawyers when they found some free time in a workday, and tried out some hobby/ just chilled.
Or just leave a “bump” in the comment if you had less than 2 hours a work on a workday.
The problem, however, is that even if you have no work, you cannot do anything apart from staying home because a a client mail may pop in any minute and you're expected to be available no matter how late. So unless you can actually do something 'fun' with your time off other than cooking or watching youtube videos, it isn't really much of a time off!
Even this does not exist in a WFO situation - where even if there's no work for the day, you're expected to stay till a minimum of of 7 or 8 PM. This is one of the primary reasons why so many are feeling exhausted after returning to office post pandemic.
If law firms could figure out better time management frameworks - where employees can clock in their hours with no daily/weekly targets and have the flexibility to clock out when they want, it would genuinely make the job a lot better.
If you're calling them 'retainers' then treat them as 'retainers' for once in this case - not employees who have to sit for a mandatory 12 hour at the workplace.
It's not that difficult to have such a system either - a simple planner/calendar sync-ed for the whole team where people can mark their available hours for the week (subject to minimum hours annually) would serve the purpose.