Season Two · Part Two · Episode 13 of 24
Susan revises the math and finds out how much it costs to make room for a path nobody budgeted.
Priya walked into the conference room with a single spreadsheet and the specific caution of someone who already knew the number she was about to give wasn’t going to be popular.
Susan, Renee, Margaret, and Jason were already at the table, with PRIME’s whiteboard still crowded from the sponsorship sessions. Priya set the spreadsheet down without ceremony. She’d learned, working with this group over the last few weeks, that ceremony only delayed the bad news; it never softened it.
“I can build you a fifteen percent exposure category within Strategic Investment Time,” she said. “What I can’t do is pretend it survives there. SIT already includes leadership development, firm citizenship, and mentoring for everyone coming up under MLARD. Add exposure time to that same bucket, and it competes for the same fifteen percent every week against things that already have a name and a habit behind them.”
“Then it loses,” Susan said. “Every time. Exposure time doesn’t have a deadline like a mentoring session does. Anything without a deadline gets pushed first when a calendar fills up. We watched Marcus’s book disappear for exactly that reason, and then watched the audit find eighty-seven more relationships headed the same way. We already know what happens to time nobody protects.”
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Jason thought of Ellen’s meetings with Anna, protected on the calendar the way a court date was, not because anyone especially wanted to defend that hour, but because moving it took an actual reason. “SIT worked because it was immovable,” he said. “Not because anyone loved it. Because you couldn’t quietly let it slide.”
“Right,” Renee said. “Which means that if exposure time lives inside SIT, unprotected on its own, we’ll get exactly what we got before PRIME had a name. Whoever already has slack in their week will use it. Whoever doesn’t, won’t. And it’ll look like a choice instead of what it actually is.”
Priya nodded slowly, like a witness confirming a fact she’d rather not. “Then it can’t be fifteen percent of the same fifteen percent,” she said. “It has to be its own category, tracked and defensible separately. Which means the math changes.”
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She turned the spreadsheet around. “Here’s what I keep running into. This isn’t a model for every lawyer in the building. Associates through the mid-level years are exactly where MLARD left them: eighty-five percent client and matter work, fifteen percent strategic investment, full stop. Don’t touch it. It’s working.”
“But past the mid-level years,” she went on, “the eighty-five percent no longer means what it used to. A senior lawyer’s value isn’t purely hours anymore. It’s judgment, it’s relationships, it’s exactly the thing Susan’s been drawing on that whiteboard for a month. The billable target has been quietly fictional for years at that stage. I’m not proposing we take fifteen percent away from anyone. I’m proposing we stop pretending the number was ever really eighty-five.”
“So what’s the real number?” Jason asked.
“Sixty,” Priya said. “Client and matter work, sixty percent. Strategic investment, twenty-five, up from fifteen, because past mid-level, that work is heavier: it’s mentoring people below you and being mentored yourself, it’s firm governance, it’s everything MLARD already asks of a senior lawyer. And fifteen percent, new, tracked on its own line, for exposure. Protected the same way SIT was protected. Nobody borrows against it without a stated reason, out loud, to somebody who’ll ask why.”
Margaret was already writing it on the whiteboard beneath PRIME’s letters. Sixty, twenty-five, fifteen. “The 60/25/15 Model,” she said, testing it. “It’s a mouthful.”
“So was eighty-five-fifteen once,” Susan said. “It stopped being a mouthful the day people started using it in sentences without thinking about it.”
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“There’s a harder problem beneath the math,” Renee said. “I don’t think we’ve solved it yet. What actually counts as exposure time? If it’s only a partner walking an associate into a room, we’ve built in a protected fifteen percent for the same nine people who were already being walked into rooms, and the only thing that has changed is the line item.”
Jason looked at the whiteboard, at the line Susan had added the afternoon of the Ostrander call: demonstrated visibility, evidence that a client sought this person out based on independent reputation, not an introduction alone. “Mei didn’t get walked into a room,” he said. “She built her own door. If exposure time counts only the version Hal knows how to do, we’re writing Mei out of the thing that’s supposed to include her.”
“Then it has to count both,” Susan said. “A partner deliberately introducing someone into a live relationship is exposure time. So is a lawyer spending logged, protected hours on the kind of visible work Mei did: writing, speaking, publishing, whatever the specific version turns out to be for that person. Different door. Same fifteen percent.”
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Priya frowned at that, the way she frowned at anything that sounded generous before it sounded enforceable. “I can protect fifteen percent of somebody’s calendar,” she said. “I can’t protect fifteen percent of somebody’s calendar for an activity with no way to tell whether it’s working. Sponsorship at least has a partner attached, someone with their own name on the outcome. What stops exposure time from becoming fifteen percent that nobody has to account for at all?”
“It gets logged either way,” Susan said. “That part isn’t optional for either path. But I wouldn’t tie the protected time itself to an outcome. Mei’s article took eight months to produce a phone call. If we’d made her prove a result before the hours counted, we’d have killed it in month two and told her the door didn’t exist before she’d finished building it.”
“So what do you track?” Priya asked.
“The hours are protected every quarter, same as SIT,” Susan said. “And separately, whether anything comes of it: an inquiry, a call, or a client who names the person unprompted. Not as a gate. As data. Just as nobody was punished for having zero formal sponsorships before any of this had a name, we don’t punish an associate for a door that hasn’t opened yet. We just stop pretending the hours spent trying don’t exist.”
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Renee sat back. “That’s the same fight we already had over nominations, just wearing different clothes,” she said. “Two candidates minimum, written criteria, so no one gets ruled out just because they weren’t the first name that came to mind. Two paths in instead of one is the same principle. Neither one gets to disqualify the other just because it’s less familiar to whoever’s reviewing it.”
“Everything after this is details,” Jason said, catching himself smiling because he’d heard Renee say almost the same thing to him a few weeks ago, during the nomination fight, and here he was handing it back.
Margaret finished the board: 60/25/15, effective for lawyers past the mid-level associate stage, with exposure time split between sponsor-led introduction and independently demonstrated visibility, both protected, both logged, neither worth more than the other on paper. She stepped back to look at it the way she’d once looked at the finished MLARD wall.
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“There’s one more thing,” Renee said before anyone stood up. “We can design the whole model, and it still won’t mean anything until somebody who isn’t already inclined to sponsor actually does it. Somebody who has to learn that the second door exists, from a standing start, in real time, with all of us watching.”
She didn’t look at Hal’s empty chair when she said it. She didn’t have to. Everyone at the table knew whose name would come next and how that conversation would have to start.
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