Time tracking is an essential element for any service-based business. Law firms and lawyers looking to boost efficiency can benefit from internal time tracking implementation. Of course, getting started can come with a few hiccups. Time tracking must integrate smoothly into your workflow and companies often encounter a few common challenges in the early days.
When a team is new at time tracking, problems like inaccurate tracking, resistance to change, and inefficient routines can all get between you and the benefits that time tracking could provide. Fortunately, you don’t have to figure out the solutions to these challenges alone. As time tracking experts, the LawBillity team can provide a helpful guide to help your law firm successfully implement your first time tracking system.
Define Clear Objectives
To get the best outcomes from your time tracking implementation, start by defining your goals. What do you want to achieve from time tracking? Why do you need a time tracking system for your business? Popular objectives include:
- Transparent hourly billing
- Tracking and improving productivity
- Clarity in project management
- Regulation compliance
Once you have defined your objectives, set measurable goals that will help you track your success. For example, you may aim to improve billable hours, reduce admin time, or see better resource allocation. These key performance indicators (KPIs) will provide clarity as you align your objectives with your law firms expectations and client needs.
Choose the Right Time Tracking Tool
With your objectives in mind, you can find the right time tracking software for the job. Different platforms offer different feature sets and workflows. The right configuration for your law firm will make it easy for your team to log their time and integrate with other tools you are already using.
Evaluate your law firms needs, here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Solo, team, or enterprise solution?
- Do you need industry-specific features for convenience or compliance?
- What software should integrate with your time tracking platform?
As you explore different time tracking tools, it can help to watch for key features that are known to enhance productivity, provide transparent data, and empower efficient, flexible workflows.
- Real-time tracking: The ability to start and stop time tracking recording in real time.
- Manual entry: The ability to enter time tracking data that was not recorded by the app
- Reporting and analytics: Transforming your time tracking data into valuable insights
- Integration with billing and payroll: Converting tracked time into payroll or invoices based on hourly work.
LawBillity provides these features and is designed to integrate with the top billing and payroll systems used by businesses today. Your team can enter data quickly through a mobile or desktop app, and data can be used both for accurate payments and reveal data-driven insights about time use and productivity.
Establish Tracking Policies and Procedures
Once our tools are ready, you can begin building your optimal time tracking policies and procedures. This will define how time tracking integrates with your workflow and how you train your team to use the chosen time tracking tools.
What Should Be Tracked
First, decide what you are tracking with time entries. Each business model tracks time using a different schema. For example, a law firm might track billable vs non-billable hours. A contractor might track time by the project phase, and many employers track time by the task or task categories such as administration, restocking, meetings, and so on.
What you track will not only reflect your business model but also define how productivity data is presented in the analytics.
Expectations for Time Entries
Define how frequently your team is expected to track their time. Daily entry is the standard approach, but some teams prefer weekly time entries when the time tracking categories are broader or general.
Guidelines for Rounding, Breaks, and Corrections
Your guidelines will determine both data accuracy and flexibility. Define how employees should handle rounding time, how break times should be tracked, and how to make corrections if time data entries are inaccurate or incomplete for any reason.
Build a Handbook
After defining your policies, you are ready to prepare a handbook or guide for your employees. Clear documentation of policies ensures that everyone is on the same page. It also provides your team with the ability to look up policies regarding time tracking whenever there might be a question.
Train Your Team and Get Buy-In
Time tracking in your law firm is something that everyone must adopt together. The potential productivity boost and the valuable insights from data analysis rely on everyone participating in accurate time tracking procedures.
Naturally, this starts with training. Introduce your time tracking tool to the team while spotlighting the benefits that everyone will experience. Offer live demos and walkthroughs, then provide open access to help resources. This will “onboard” your team and accelerate their adoption of the new technology.
Listen to feedback and address concerns about micromanagement and privacy. Time tracking often brings up a few questions. Fortunately, a platform like LawBillity makes it easy to provide the right reassurances.
Lastly, get your team members involved in the setup process. This increases their sense of ownership with the new system and often leads to better overall adoption.
Start Small and Optimize
When introducing online time tracking to your law firm, it can be helpful to pilot the system with one department or project. This gives you a chance to explore the most efficient ways to integrate your chosen tool with your law firm’s workflow and put your policies to the test.
Gather feedback from your pilot team and adjust the settings, policies, and workflows until time tracking feels like a natural part of their routine. Then you can start introducing a more fine-tuned time tracking implementation to a growing percentage of teams in your law firm.
Track KPIs to help assess the impact of time tracking on each team and refine the process as you go along. Once the system has been honed to your needs, implement company-wide roll out.
Monitor, Report, and Improve
The final step is to prepare for constant improvement. Every solution in your stack can potentially be optimized for greater positive effects. Time tracking is no exception. Review your time tracking data regularly to identify trends, inefficiencies, and billing opportunities that are highlighted based on how time is used by your team.
You can then use the built-in reports and analytics features to perform reviews, assess budgets, and forecast future performance based on the historical data you collect. From there, you have the tools to continuously optimize your processes and update policies as needed to ensure the best performance and smooth implementation of time tracking for your team.
Achieving First-Time Time Tracking Success
Setting up an online time tracking system is an investment in productivity and profitability. The best way to see optimal results is to start small and stay consistent as you build a strong firm-wide implementation plan. We can help.
LawBillity was designed to empower law firms to easily record time data, generate transparent time sheets for payroll and billing, and provide valuable insights though data analytics and reports. Try LawBillity for your law firm with our 14-day free trial.
