EVERY YEAR, LAWYERS and law firms all across America repeat the same ritual. We take brand-new law graduates and teach them what they never learned in law school. In doing so, we set the tone for the rest of their legal careers.

One of the very first of these lessons is the importance of time keeping so that their work can be billed to our clients. We tell these new lawyers that the principal commodity they have to sell is their time. And, by the way, if they expect to be successful attorneys in this firm, they had better bill those clients at least, say, 2,000 or 2,300 or even 2,500 hours each and every year of their future law practices. As the icing on the cake, we add that if they exceed these requirements, there will be a nice bonus in it for them as well.

As a result, we preordain the outcome. Instead of these young lawyers faithfully recording the actual time they have worked on client matters - be it a total of 1,500 or even 1,800 hours in their first year of trying to learn the craft of lawyering - they will almost inevitably write down on their time sheets the requisite 2,000 to 2,500 hours.

Why do they stretch their billable hours? Because we have, in not so subtle ways, let them know that if they don't, they and their high-paid associate positions are gone. We have confronted them with a moral and ethical dilemma in their young lives most of them can solve only by buckling under our pressure.

As their very first lesson in the practice of law, we, their mentors and teachers in the law, have taught them how to cheat the same clients whom we have taken an oath to faithfully serve. By doing so, we set in motion a process of diminishing ethical and moral values in our new lawyers that appears to have no end.

Our new associates perceive that we have condoned the practice of cutting corners and padding time in order to meet our own self-created financial needs. Thus begins a downward spiral of declining professionalism that allows more and more lawyers to mentally justify to themselves less and less ethical conduct in the name of their own personal wants - be they financial or emotional.

As you read this, I can just imagine many of you grinding your teeth and muttering, "But they can put in that many hours. It only takes 50 hours a week 50 weeks a year to do it. That's just 8.33 billable hours a day six days a week. No sweat. Besides, everyone bills this way, so why shouldn't we?"

That, however, is the thinking of a snowflake. No snowflake feels responsible when the avalanche it is riding wipes out everything in its path. Well, for us lawyers, what is in our paths are our clients and what we are wiping out through padded billing is their confidence in us, in our professionalism and in the justice system itself

So let's go back to those 50-hour weeks with their 8.33 billable-hour days. If we are honest with ourselves and our young associates, we have to admit that it is almost impossible to do that each and every day, six days a week, 50 weeks a year. People have to eat lunch, go to the bathroom, deal with staff problems, read inner-office memos, answer non-billable phone calls, get their teeth fixed and their hair cut, plus do a thousand other things that cut into that time week in and week out - not to mention attending to the needs of their family lives.

And what's worse is that by predetermining how much time has to be used up to meet their billing requirements, we teach our lawyers to expand the work they do on any given project so that those 8.33 hours are filled and billed. We don't seem to care that the same job could be more efficiently done in less time if the lawyers were not focused on their time sheet totals.

No matter, you respond. The clients will take our word on how much time was needed for each task - because for them it's like shooting craps over the phone when we hold the dice. If we say double sixes turned up on the roll when it was really snake eyes, how are they to know?

But we know the truth, and so do our young lawyers. The recorded hours become like gas in a vacuum. They expand to fill the allotted volume of time. And whether we admit it or not, each time we pad those numbers, it diminishes us in our own minds and hearts. We give up little bits of our professional pride and honor until they all but disappear, leaving only a hollow shell of professionalism we hide behind like a mask.

What we have done is to intentionally set out to dull our associates' consciences in the same way ours have become dulled. Because, you see, when the money is rolling in and everything else feels great, the only thing that hurts is your conscience.

A friend of mine I will call Sarah recently recounted a story to me with a shake of her head. She was co-counseling a case with a much larger firm from out of town. The client had decided to equally divide the casework between the two firms. About six months into the matter, she got a call from her lead co-counsel who, after hemming and hawing, said, "Sarah, I've seen your bills to our client. You have got to bring them up. You're making us look bad."

There were no questions regarding how Sarah's firm could do the same amount of work so much more efficiently. Instead, there was just the conscience-dulling suggestion to bill more hours so the lead firm wouldn't have to reduce theirs.

This little tale seems to define one of the central ethical dilemmas of the modern practice of law. When professionalism comes up against profit, it is profit that wins more often than not.

Let us not put our young associates and ourselves in the ethical position of Watergate defendant Jeb Magruder, himself a relatively young lawyer, when he said, "I know what I have done, and Your Honor knows what I have done. Somewhere between my ambition and my ideals, I lost my ethical compass."

Instead, we should heed the words of Mark Twain: "Morals (and ethics) are an acquirement like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker or paralysis. No one is born with them."

So let's try harder to teach our young lawyers positive lessons. Our need for wealth should not be their first priority. Instead of teaching them how to predetermine billing outcomes to the financial detriment of our clients, let's focus both them and ourselves on doing each task as efficiently as possible. Let the total amount of the time consumed be judged by that standard.

Let's also forsake the practice of setting associate bonuses based on the amount of gross time they have charged our clients. Instead, we should predicate them on how much they have accomplished as lawyers without respect to the billable hours involved.

There is an old saying that all of us have to live with ourselves so we should see to it that we always have good company. Let's try to keep our own consciences sharp and alive. In doing so, keep in mind that it is far easier to prevent bad habits than to break those already acquired. Let's not force our young lawyers into the same bad habits we older lawyers struggle against.

And don't forget the words of Oscar Wilde, "No man (or woman) is rich enough to buy back his past."

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