Why Everyone Should Track Time Like a Lawyer

Nobody’s time is as valuable as a lawyer’s. Just look at their rates.

Whether it’s an hourly fee, contingency fee, flat rate or retainer – hiring a lawyer is a costly endeavor. And nobody knows that better than attorneys themselves.

That’s why legal professionals got so good at keeping track of time, billable time to be precise. And precise they have to be, as billing by the 10th of the hour, i.e., in 6-minute increments, is standard practice in the legal field.

Most of us have a rather distorted conception of where our time goes. There’s a lot to learn from people like lawyers who make it a habit to treat every minute of their work days as an opportunity to bring value to the client and, by doing so, make a profit.

Without further ado, let me present my argument for why everyone should track their time like a lawyer. Following the rules of legal arguments, this decision will be based on the law (of profitability), the facts (of time tracking), and the evidence (of good time tracking always turning a profit).

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let’s get to it.

How do lawyers track their time?

Like their livelihood depends on it. Because it does.

Lawyers charge for their time, whether it’s in the form of an hourly rate, flat rate, or contingency fee. The amount of money they make, therefore, depends on how many total billable hours they can track and charge for.

Legal billable hours are calculated in small increments. Let’s take a look at what those increments and their use cases are.

6 minutes (.1 of an hour)

The infamous 6-minute increment for billing aka 1/10 hour is used by legal professionals all over the world. We’ve explored the reason why lawyers track time in 6-minute increments earlier on the blog but if you don’t have time to get into it, here’s a simple rationale.

With hourly rates as high as lawyers’, smaller increments are justified and work in the client’s favor. If the default smallest increment is 6 minutes, then the subsequent bigger increments are 12 and 18 minutes respectively.

15 minutes (.25 of an hour)

Tracking time in 15-minute increments is common among lawyers who work on retainers. A retainer covers many billable hours at once, purchased in bulk and paid for in advance.

It’s crucial both to the legal professional and the client to keep track of time to know when the retainer is running out. For the lawyer, it’s important to avoid overservicing and undercharging the client. For the client, it’s crucial to be notified of a retainer running out to ensure they can keep getting the legal assistance they need.

To communicate to the client that the initial retainer payment is exhausted, lawyers send an invoice for the work done, with tasks broken down into 15-minute intervals. This makes it easy for the client to see where the retainer money has gone and how much they need to pay to ensure uninterrupted provision of legal services.

30 minutes (.5 of an hour)

Tracking time in 30-minute increments is more common for in-house lawyers and legal professionals whose sole focus is on one big case for a prolonged period of time.

As far as legal timekeeping goes, ½ hour is a big time increment which works for cases where continuous legal services are provided and the client gets a weekly or monthly bill with a breakdown by 30 or even 60 minutes to get a general understanding of how that time was allocated or justify a charge that’s bigger than normal.

What can lawyers bill for?

Big law hours are crazy and it’s hard to believe that lawyers are even human to work that much. And yet, not every waking moment of a lawyer’s day is spent doing client work.

Some of the time in a busy week of an attorney is allocated to non-billable activities or tasks that don’t strictly fit the bill of case work but can still be recorded as billable time as per the law firm’s policy.

Let’s consider some examples of these tasks and activities.

Let’s now review the time tracking methods used by legal professionals of every caliber.

Legal time tracking methods

Before going into the legal time tracking methods, let’s establish some generic comparison criteria and approaches to time tracking as a lawyer.

DIY/Assisted

Not all lawyers track time, at least not first-hand. Some attorneys, especially more senior in age and grade, delegate time tracking and billable time entry to legal assistants.

They will either keep a paper-based account of their time on client matters and then pass it on to a paralegal or secretary who enters the times into the system – or let the assistant do the job based on the senior partner’s calendar or emails.

This practice is more common than you think, and some law firms simply made peace with the fact that senior partners won’t track their own time.

Real-time/retroactive

Lawyers can track time as they proceed from one matter to the next throughout the day – or they can put timesheets off until the end of the day at best and the end of the month at worst.

In the former scenario, a task can’t be marked complete until it’s made it to a time entry, i.e., logged under a client or project as billable time. Even something as simple as answering a client email that took 0.1 of an hour has to be logged as billable time before the lawyer can proceed to another matter.

A more common approach is to track time retroactively, i.e., at the end of the day, week, or month, depending on the timesheet policy. Although most attorneys agree that this is detrimental to the accuracy of their timesheets, legal time tracking rarely happens on the same day.

Manual/automated

Last but not least, we have to distinguish between manual and automated methods of legal time tracking. Manual time tracking encompasses all the methods that require manual work, be that jotting down, pressing the start and stop buttons on a timer, or running a stopwatch.

Automated methods include using some kind of software or time tracker app that captures work hours autonomously without interrupting case work.

Regardless of the overall approach to legal time tracking, a lawyer’s ability to accurately calculate the number of billable hours determines their monthly income or their position at the firm. We’ll now go over the time tracking methods used by lawyers in the order of most to least work they require.

Method 1: Bullet journaling

Back in 2014, the American Bar Association (ABA) recommended using a notebook, smartphone, and legal timekeeping software as equally excellent ways of tracking lawyer time.

10 years later, bullet journals, notebooks, and legal pads are still used by lawyers for daily time tracking. Jotting down timestamps and descriptions throughout the day is how some attorneys prefer to keep track of time and their work on cases.

The biggest advantage of paper-based time tracking as noted by lawyers themselves is not needing to press the start and stop button on a running timer. This is something a lot of attorneys deem unhelpful and simply unrealistic to maintain.

Method 2: Dictation/transcribing

Dictation and subsequent transcribing is an assisted method of time tracking that involves the work of a paralegal or some other assistant to a lawyer.

Whether it’s based on a paper record of what was done on a given day or only memory, dictating one’s time entries is a practice used by either very busy or less tech-savvy senior partners.

Method 3: Calendar, email, and call history

Tracing one’s work by calendar events, sent emails, or the calls made and received throughout the day is another method of legal timekeeping. It comes with obvious limitations; for one, meetings rarely take exactly as much time as planned.

However, a calendar or call history is better than no trace at all, especially if you do your time tracking at the end of the week or month. Some lawyers may even look at the version history of the documents they reviewed to determine how long it took them to work on each case.

Method 4: Excel spreadsheets

Excel spreadsheets are the crowd’s favorite. They’re free, highly customizable, and digital. There are many timesheet and activity log templates available online (including our own), easy to copy and start filling out right away.

Excel spreadsheets are also easy to share with the accounting department, office manager or whoever is handling legal timekeeping at your firm. The hard part is actually remembering to fill them out as you move from one matter to another.

Method 5: Start/stop timers

Running timers are available in all shapes and sizes. It can be in the form of a desktop app hovering over all programs and documents – or it can be a mobile app that’s easy to use on the go for tracking things like travel time and court waiting time.

Most lawyers, however, will use a start/stop timer built into their time tracking software. It can be specialized legal timekeeping software like Clio or Lawcus. It can also be a wide-use tool for timer-based time tracking in professional services like Harvest or Toggl Track.

Running timers receive mixed reviews from legal professionals. While some don’t mind the interruptions, others fail to remember about the running timer and prefer other methods of lawyer time tracking.

Method 6: Computer activity tracking

Automatic time tracking aka computer activity recording is a way of documenting a busy lawyer’s day without running timers, keeping a bullet journal, or going through email history.

It’s done with a time tracker that runs autonomously in the background 24/7 and records a lawyer’s time in all programs, files, documents, and even calls. An example of such a tracker is our very own Memtime.

Here’s a quick look of the features that make it a great fit for lawyers:

• It records every minute of every day automatically.
• It displays captured activity in 6-minute intervals.
• It keeps your data offline and private to you.
• It connects to VoIP software to capture calls duration.
• It connects to lawyer software like Clio and Lawcus.
• It syncs time entries directly into your timesheet.

Time tracking & law firm profitability

Upon joining a law firm, attorneys receive time targets. On the one hand, you have the target for billable hours per month or year. A lawyer joining a firm can expect an annual target of 2,000+ hours, which is to say they’re required to bill for over 8 hours every day, 5 days a week.

Law firms calculate the annual billable hour target based on various metrics and financial goals set by the partners.

• Total revenue
• Revenue per lawyer
• Profit per equity partner
• Case profitability

You’re welcome to read more on how a billable hour target is calculated in a larger service business context. It takes into account the revenue target of a firm, cost per employee, and the average billable hourly rate.

In addition to the annual or monthly billable hour target, lawyers can have time targets for particular types of tasks, e.g., how long different legal tasks are supposed to take. This is done to improve utilization and prevent overservicing.

Just like a legal solo practitioner’s profits depend on their ability to accurately capture billable time, a law firm’s profitability depends on how accurately case profitability is determined.

Not all cases will bring the firm equal profits corresponding to the time actually spent on them, especially where a retainer is paid. It’s essential that the timesheet policy is observed and accounting gets all time data from all the legal staff.

The absolute majority of law firms resort to some kind of legal timekeeping software to enable all legal staff to accurately capture billable time and pass it on to accounting. Legal software has a range of applications and benefits, and the time tracking feature is often enhanced with plugins and add-ons for automation.

4 time tracking tips to steal

Before we wrap it up, let’s list the biggest learning points we can take from lawyers when it comes to tracking time. The tips below come from those attorneys who manage to successfully track their hours and ensure profitability of their work.

1. Don’t rely on memory

Whatever time tracking method you end up using, make sure you don’t rely on your memory alone. The damage done by not tracking in real-time is measured in hours of lost billables every week.

Going through your calendar events, emails, and calls is not much better if you handle multiple client cases a day. An automated work log is your best friend when it comes to accurately capturing time throughout the day.

2. Value every minute

Rounding hours is what many of us do to simplify time tracking and billing. One thing to learn from lawyers is that your rounding policy has a direct impact on your bottom line.

Making every minute count is what the 0.1 hour increment is all about. You may not charge $600 an hour but every minute of your time is valuable and you should make it count towards your total billable hours.

3. Block time to log time

It’s a fact of life that the longer you wait to log time, the less accurate your time entries are. This is because so much happens in a work week that reconstructing your days in small increments becomes a huge task, even if you have automatic time tracking under your sleeve.

Successful lawyers make time to get paid, i.e., track time on client matters and add their time entries to the system. If you can do this every day for 10 minutes, you won’t have to spend hours at the end of the month in frustration and making the inevitable mistakes.

Treat timesheets as seriously as client matters because they’re an important extension of the work done.

4. Use lawyer time tracking tools

You don’t have to be a lawyer to benefit from the time tracking methods and tools lawyers use. While it makes no sense for you to invest in legal software if you’re not a lawyer, you can use time trackers designed for attorneys among other service business professionals, e.g. Memtime.

With Memtime, anybody can automatically capture their work in 6-minute increments and have the level of precision of time tracking required in the legal field. Channel your inner attorney and download Memtime right now. Get started with lawyer-sharp automatic time tracking to make every minute count.

Final provisions

Tracking time like a lawyer means being intentional about your work hours. It’s not good enough to treat them as one slump of 40 hours that are allocated to work-related tasks. Every minute of your time counts and could impact your profits for any given week, whether you charge an hourly rate or not.

Lawyers know the value of their time in very specific numbers. They also know it’s their job to capture and communicate this value to clients. We can all learn from legal professionals about transparency in work, be that small tasks completed throughout the day or hours of case research, professional reading, or work-related travel.

Track your time like a lawyer because you’re not getting it back. The best you can do is make sure you get reimbursed fairly for your work by making your contribution seen, however small that may be.