Time Management Tactics for Busy Lawyers and Attorneys

Legal professionals are some of the busiest people out there. 60+ hour workweeks, multiple client cases at once, in-person appointments requiring travel, and always high stakes, whether you’re a corporate lawyer or a public defender.

Never mind going the solo attorney journey, as in this case you’ll need to put on a one-person show and handle marketing and admin in addition to the substantive legal work, accounting, and everything else that goes into running your own practice.

No wonder time management skills are at the top of the work requirements for any legal professional. If you want to make a career in legal services, getting things done while avoiding error and burnout is paramount.

Time management for attorneys is a skill that can be taught and acquired with experience. Whether you choose to take a course or research the tips and tactics on your own, the important thing is to stick to your time management routine and tools.

In this article, we’re looking at time management tactics for busy lawyers and attorneys.

Let’s get into it.

Why is time management important for lawyers?

Time management is important for lawyers for all of the reasons it’s important for other professionals, except legal services require an unmatched level of precision when it comes to keeping track of time.

Together with accountants and consultants, lawyers bill in the smallest increments imaginable, with the 6-minute increment being the industry average. Now, think of a standard 40-hour workweek as an opportunity to bill your rate 400 times. Of course you’d want to master time management and make the most of your earning potential on any given week.

Because time management is so closely related to billing and earnings in the legal industry, it’s a skill that comes with high rewards. Or the opposite could be true as poor time management leads to low profitability and continuous demoralization of legal professionals despite longer than normal workdays and very high stakes.

Setting the profits aside and assuming you work on a retainer, you still want to make sure you use your time wisely because it’s so easy to get overworked in the legal field. The requirements are very high and it’s up to you to organize your day so you can serve all your clients, pay adequate attention to all matters, and also not end up with a burnout.

Time management is arguably the most important skill an attorney can acquire. Compared to a law degree, it’s relatively easy to learn but it will last you a lifetime and only get sharper as you’re advancing in your career. If you can master time management, you set yourself up for success in resolving all client matters in a timely manner and with no error on your part.

How do lawyers manage time?

Faced with the challenge of time management, legal professionals resort to one of the tried and tested ways of keeping track of their work hours. Let’s review the most common ones.

To-do lists

Many lawyers find to-do lists – whether it’s handwritten notes or spreadsheets – to be most helpful when establishing a better time management routine. There are two ways to look at to-do lists as a time management tool.

1. Short-term/daily tasks.
2. Long-term tasks and priorities.

Stopwatch timer

No manual timekeeping routine is complete without a timer. If you’re a lawyer who bills for their time in increments or simply tries to provide better estimates and avoid burnout, you need to time your work and know how long it takes you to complete tasks.

Adding times to your to-do list is how you establish a timekeeping routine required for billing and time management. A running timer is a key feature of timekeeping software that’s part of law firm software used by attorneys and other legal professionals. It can simplify the process of hour logging by not delaying it till the end of the day or leaving it to memory altogether.

Practice software

Since we’re on the subject of legal practice software, it’s an excellent way to organize tasks and manage time while also keeping client priorities in mind. Law firm software automates some of that pesky admin, streamlines billing, and helps lawyers stay on track.

Most importantly, legal practice software accounts for all types of tasks, including non-billable work. It’s important to keep those hours in mind when planning your day or reflecting on time management of the past week.

Let’s now get to the 5 tactics to nail time management as a busy lawyer.

5 time management tactics for attorneys

Legal time management may seem overwhelming as many clients like to create a sense of urgency even around the most mundane matters. If you want to adopt a time management routine that works for you in the long term, it’s important to remember that there are few emergencies in law.

With this mantra in mind, let’s review the 5 time management tactics for attorneys.

1. Delegate

The easiest way to reclaim your hours is to take some tasks off your plate altogether. Specifically when it comes to bookkeeping, accounting, and admin tasks at large, most lawyers are better off solving for these with additional staffing.

Hiring help comes with an initial investment of your time for onboarding but it always pays off in the long run. Especially if you’re running a solo practice and could use some extra hands.

2. Up your rate

Increasing your hourly rate may seem like an odd time management technique but it makes sense when you look at your time as money. Raising your rate as a lawyer will do 2 things:

1. You won’t need as many clients to make a profit.
2. You’ll get fewer but higher quality clients.

3. Adopt the 2-minute rule

Speaking of urgent requests and disruptions, these can really mess up any carefully organized workday. Emails and phone calls are two of the biggest distractions to a lawyer’s day. Consider adopting the 2-minute rule coined by David Allen.

This is a good philosophy to adopt when dealing with incoming emails and some of the calls. For the rest of the calls, if you don’t want to lose half a day to distractions and regaining focus, block time for returning missed calls.

4. Block your calendar

While we’re on the topic of time blocking, it’s an invaluable tool for legal time management. Something as simple as using 15-minute blocks for tasks can boost your productivity and minimize context switching.

Seeing how it takes 25 minutes on average to regain focus after an interruption, make sure you have uninterrupted focus streaks to complete tasks and accurately bill clients. This is also how you avoid the feeling of “where did all my time go?”

When blocking your calendar, don’t skip these two things:

• Lunch breaks
• Pockets of space for rest

5. Build a timekeeping routine you’ll stick to

Timekeeping aka logging hours in your legal practice software, submitting timesheets, etc. is the key part of working in the legal field. Even if your tracked hours don’t exactly translate to revenue, many law firms have a billable utilization target that still needs to be met.

For this, you need a timekeeping routine you’ll actually stick to. Some lawyers use the timekeeping/timer feature of their practice software to record time on matters and log time entries throughout the day. This inevitably disrupts your day but if you can learn to refocus fast you’ll end up with highly accurate timesheets.

Which brings us to the topic of advanced lawyer time tracking solutions.

Bonus: crash course in lawyer time tracking

Lawyer time tracking is an admin task that can be a real time-drain and still result in half-accurate data because the running timer was forgotten or meetings exceeded the allotted timeframe.

In order to complement legal work and not hinder it, attorney time tracking needs to be:

1. Automated – not requiring input from the lawyer.
2. Precise – capturing tasks in the smallest increments.
3. Connected – integrated with legal practice software.

An excellent example of a time tracker for lawyers that ticks all the boxes is Memtime. Instead of time tracking, it does computer activity recording. This means that everything you do on your computer throughout the day is privately documented in a chronological timeline. This timeline is stored locally on your computer and visible only to you.

The app runs quietly in the background, you don’t need to do anything or even have it open. At any point during the day or week, you can open Memtime and see everything you’ve worked on in 1-60 minute intervals. You’ll see the tabs you opened, the emails you replied to, the documents you edited, etc.

The best part is that Memtime integrates with legal practice software, e.g. Clio or Lawcus and allows you to create and export time entries directly to your system. This is how you automate timesheets and ensure you always have 100% accurate data for billing.

Getting started with automated legal time tracking is very easy and requires no initial investment or complicated setup. Simply create an account with Memtime and use it for free for 14 days to see the difference it can make to your legal timekeeping and revenue.

Final thoughts

If anybody deserves more than 24 hours in a day, it’s lawyers and attorneys. Time management for them is not only about feeling more productive, it’s about meeting the high requirements of the legal field as well as the reality of day-to-day legal work for clients.

Among the tactics busy lawyers can use to better manage their time are delegating admin tasks, raising the hourly rate, using the 2-minute rule for incoming emails, and implementing time blocking for more focused work. But most importantly, attorney time management techniques need to support the legal timekeeping workflow.

Use this article to nail legal time management and build a timekeeping routine you’ll stick to. Every minute of your time as a lawyer is valuable and should be treated as such.