Legal firms have used manual time tracking since the dawn of the profession. Of course, originally, it was the only option. Lawyers have always needed to keep precise notes regarding how their time is spent to accurately charge billable hours and expenses to their clients. The downside is that manual time tracking comes at a cost. It is time-consuming, prone to error, and the process is not among billable tasks. When law firms have the option to automate time tracking using state-of-the-art software, the hidden costs of continuing to use manual time tracking are many-faceted.
What is manual time tracking costing your lawyers and your legal firm? Let’s examine each aspect of time tracking and the cost of traditional manual time tracking over automation.
Unbilled Hours of Work Every Week
It has been found that manual time tracking leads to 15%-30% lost billable hours. This is the result of trying to balance accuracy and efficiency.
To save time, many lawyers make their time tracking notes at the end of the day. Some wait until the end of the week. However, this comes at a unique cost. Smaller tasks and work sessions are lost, and whole hours of cumulative time focused on cases may be overlooked. It is estimated that lawyers who wait until the end of the day typically shortchange themselves by around 15% to 20% of billable time. Those who wait until the end of the week may lose as much as 25% to 30% of billable work between various cases worked during that time.
Time Lost to Administrative Tasks
Manual time tracking also consumes a lawyer’s time spent on administrative tasks. It takes time to note the exact time a lawyer changes tasks. The more accurate the notations, the more time it takes to make them throughout the day.
Then, it takes more time to collate those daily notes into billable hours by client and case. Adding the right LEDES codes for corporate clients adds another task. It then takes yet more time to format the notes into a billable invoice, or data that can be sent to the billing department.
Each individual lawyer loses several hours a week to manual time tracking, especially if the task is done carefully and correctly.
The Routine Risk of Human Error
Even the most meticulous lawyers make mistakes, and the more time tracking tasks they are required to complete in a week, the higher chance that a mistake will occur. The same is true for lawyers who are in high demand with a busy schedule. Mistakes happen when people are rushed, distracted, or splitting their time in many directions.
Perhaps they will forget to note partial hours of work. Perhaps they will enter the wrong LEDES code or forget the code entirely. Perhaps data will be entered on the wrong date, or data is lost on a particularly busy day. These mistakes, while perfectly understandable, lead to delays, inaccuracies, time lost to corrections and lost billable hours.
Late Time Records and Irregular Billing Schedule
Another common problem with manual time tracking is the synchronization between time records and billing schedules. Law firms do best with a clockwork billing schedule that clients can rely on. But manual time tracking requires lawyers to create their own time records and personally send them on to billing – or even to handle billing themselves on an individual basis.
If invoices are sent out at a specific time, manual time tracking can result in late, missing, or incomplete time records by the regular deadline. If billing occurs when time records are ready, it can result in an irregular billing schedule that leads to less satisfied clients.
Poor Transparency for Clients
Manual time tracking can also damage the transparency that clients appreciate in legal billing. Clients like to see a clear and well-organized breakdown of how their billable hours were spent on specific tasks and case progress. However, creating this detail is more time-consuming work for lawyers. It is also difficult for people to keep a routine template for time documentation – especially with multiple lawyers on a single case because everyone does their manual time tracking a little differently.
Clients want transparency, but efficient manual time tracking is done in summary, leading to less transparency and satisfaction for your clients.
Saving Time and Money with Automated Time Tracking and Billing
The good news is that manual time tracking is no longer the only way. While tradition suggest keeping a hand-written journal of time spent on legal casework, there are digital solutions that offer greater accuracy, convenience, and cost savings that are realized with every week of streamlined time tracking and billing.
Automated time tracking software for legal firms makes it possible to quickly and easily clock tasks, switch which task or case is on the clock, select details and LEDES codes for each task, and make rapid corrections if a transition is omitted from the daily record.
With automated time tracking and billing, your lawyers can:
- Capture those partial casework hours with ease, ensuring all billable hours are invoiced
- Increase time tracking accuracy
- Decrease the risk of human error
- Isolate and track the time used for administrative tasks
- Quickly and easily assign notes, details and LEDES codes to time records
- Automatically send weekly time-tracking data to billing to be invoiced on time
- Provide transparency and identically structured details in each client invoice
Explore Automated Time Tracking and Billing for Your Law Firm
If your law firm is still using manual time tracking by default, it’s time to try something new. With automated time tracking and billing, you can reveal and remedy those hidden costs of manual time tracking while freeing your legal staff from hours of additional admin work each week.
LawBillity is a platform designed to meet the unique time tracking and billing needs of legal firms. With a wide range of features tailored to streamline legal billing through automated time tracking and integration with all popular legal billing technology, getting started is quick and easy. Try our 14-day free trial to discover the ease and cost-savings of automated time tracking and legal billing.
