Lawyers’ best frienemy: Time tracking and billing

Wastage seems like an inevitable problem that any business, including legal services will encounter. No matter how much we emphasise and strive towards productivity, some interruptions and ingrained processes that are likely to be wasting time come up throughout your workday. These interruptions can potentially damage the profitability of your law firm. Find out about the common "time and resource wasters" in law firms and you how you avoid them in this article.

A cluttered digital workspace

One of the biggest time and resource wasters for lawyers is the amount of time lost searching for documents or information in their computer or email. Using legal document management systems can help you to quickly navigate through documents and instantly access the necessary information is crucial. Eliminating the time and effort that’s wasted from manually sifting through file cabinets will speed up your operational efficiency.

Adopting technology that allows you to completely go paperless and digitalise will reduce these two waste factors. For example, capitalise on integrated digital signing solutions or automating everyday tasks like document creation, email scheduling, and task management to improve efficiency. A streamlined legal document management system like Tessaract's reduces time wasters so you can focus on more pressing demands.

Time tracking

“You lose 10 percent of your revenue if you record time entries the same day. You lose 25 percent if you wait 24 hours, and 50 to 70 percent if you wait one week. Wait 30 days, and the losses may be as high as 200 to 280 percent of the revenue they should have.”

American Bar Association

Tracking chargeable hours is often considered one of the biggest gripes of being a lawyer or running a law firm. Time tracking is important precisely because it tracks how long has spent working on a case and how much you should charge. It serves as an indisputable record of work done by the lawyer, so there will not be any arguments over how much the client must pay. One of the best things you can do to improve your law firm’s profitability is to increase efficiencies around billing and invoicing. If lawyers can easily track how all their time has been spent, they can adjust and shift resources accordingly to maximize efficiency and use of time. 

A few tips and solutions to consider include:

• Use a time-tracking solution that allows lawyers to easily input billable hours as they go. Options include convenient stop-and-start toggle switches, or even automated time tracking that runs in the background of your computers. 
• Avoid manual time tracking across multiple notebooks, post-it notes or the backs of envelopes. These manual methods are guaranteed to waste time and will result in underbilling.
• To improve the accuracy of their utilisation rate, lawyers have to track every single minute of their time. Both billable and non-billable metrics can be crucial in understanding where to shift resources to streamline efficiency.

Billing

Billing is an essential process in a law firm’s financial and client management. However, law firms regularly face challenges when they fail to enforce efficient time tracking and invoicing systems into their law firm billing process. This is due to law firms having many moving parts that have to deal with the stress of focusing on repetitive administrative tasks, like tracking billable hours, sending or receiving invoices, and tracking down late payments. These everyday tasks require more time and effort than they should because firms are using antiquated methods to accomplish daily tasks.

Many law firms hopped onto the bandwagon of electronic billing programmes as soon as they entered the market. However, many such systems are now outdated or not designed for use by lawyers so you may end up spending just as much time managing the program as you used to spend doing this manually.

Tesseract's all-in-one billing software enables you to centralise various billing components instead of using a dozen different applications to manage your firm's payment and billing. With features like time tracking and expense management, you can utilise a single management system for better organisation and greater oversight.

Need help or want to know more?

If you're interested in finding out how Tessaract can help you reduce the biggest time wasters in your law firm, feel free to schedule a no-obligation consultation with us. With versatile modules to cover all the areas above and more, Tessaract's practice management system can help your law firm achieve agile workflows for greater productivity.