Why Lawyers Should Start Using Digital Time Management Tools

Law is the first industry that used paper timesheets to record time worked and bill clients accordingly. In fact, they still use them, regardless of how faulty and time-consuming they might be.

A survey of small law firms (30 attorneys or less) conducted by Thomson Reuters identified the top five challenges these firms face, in order of importance:

• New client acquisition
• Too much time spent on administrative tasks
• Cost control and expense growth
• Lack of internal efficiency
• Rate pressure from clients (demanding more or less)

Besides the first one, the other four challenges are in direct relation to their conventional timekeeping method. Another interesting thing we learned from this survey is how those small law firm’s lawyers spend their days — almost 40% of their workday is spent on tasks unrelated to law practice.

Being an industry that relies heavily on billing by the hour, a question pops up — why are lawyers often not keeping up with technology?

Part of the answer lies in security and confidentiality matters. However, they lose on time management and data storage that way.

Many lawyers fill their timesheets at the end of a week or a month, reconstructing their time from their calendars and emails, while filling the gaps from memory. As a result, those timesheets are full of mistakes, especially when it comes to time spent on phone calls and emails. The time recorded a few days after the work happened will surely end up faulty — for as much as 30–40%, stats show. But, even in a short conversation, good advice is worth being documented and charged for.

Since attorneys do most of their work on computers, using time tracking software for lawyers that runs in the background sounds like an ideal way they can properly track their time. What’s more, with automated software, they’re relieved from remembering to press the start and stop button.

The Importance of Tracking Everything

If you’re finally on board with automated time management tools, don’t spend more time thinking about whether something should be tracked or not. Simply, track your whole workday, and beyond. Track both billable and non-billable hours, and you’ll see how those add up. This is important, as you’ll gain a good insight into how much time you spend on these things, and if you can reorganize your workflow better.

Impartial data is needed for making good business decisions. Otherwise, it will take a long time before you might realize your matters are profitable. Let’s think of it this way: Your hourly rate is $200, and every day you work overtime for as little as 10 minutes, but you don’t bill that. That’s $33 you lose per day, and if you do the math, it’s almost $8,000 a year! Now that’s easy money earned by little effort, and without tracking it, you’re flushing it down the drain. I hope you’ll think about that the next time you spend some extra minutes after work to make a call or send an email.

Client Billing

You don’t want to overcharge your client, but you surely don’t want to underbill them either. Attorney time tracking software provides you detailed information about where your time went while working for a specific client. The client login feature here proves quite useful. It allows you to give your client gated access to data concerning their matter, while your other work is secured. This saves you some precious time you’d otherwise spend answering their questions. And trust me; they surely have plenty of those.

Evaluation Time

Time tracking program won’t provide you instantly with great time management skills, that’s something that comes with practice. After a certain period of using hours tracking system, do the self-assessment. Use time management tools to create performance reports on a weekly, monthly and annual basis. Compare those reports, and you’re sure to see some improvement in your productivity.

In Conclusion

Implementation of time management tools into a workspace should be imperative for every attorney. Not only they’ll be more aware of where their time goes, billable and non-billable, but they’ll also be able to get a grasp of better time management and increase their efficiency.