Automated Time Tracking in Law Firm

Time tracking is one of those administrative processes in a lawyer's routine that has become irreplaceable; removing it would be a challenging task, as it would contend with practices that have evolved historically and are deeply ingrained in the essence of legal advice and the legal profession. It is an aspect of their work that lawyers cannot ignore, avoid, or postpone until the end of the month.

When lawyers document their hours accurately, they ensure that every minute spent on a client's case is accounted for and billable. This precision prevents revenue loss by avoiding the need to write off unrecorded or poorly documented time as non-billable. The more detailed and precise the time tracking, the more financially accurate and efficient the billing process becomes, benefiting both the law firm and its clients.

To track time efficiently, lawyers need to have good time management skills. Simply put, time tracking is a reflection of the timekeepers' time management. The better they manage their time, the easier time tracking becomes.

Like many other administrative tasks, time tracking itself has significant potential for automation, perhaps more than any other task in this category.

Myths in Legal Time Tracking

The first conceptual myth is that law firms should allow their employees to do flexible time tracking and billing free from any limitations, and hope that all the lawyers will align their entries with billing guidelines. While creativity benefits from freedom, administrative tasks like billing should be straightforward, restrictive, and sometimes even overly limiting. Poor time tracking can result from a lack of discipline, or simply from a reluctance to engage too deeply with administrative chores. The issue with neglecting time tracking is that the longer it is ignored and postponed, the more severe the consequences for the fee earner will be - ranging from retrospective weekend billing to inaccurate time entries and massive write-offs.

The next reality is that a law firm, which consists of thousands of lawyers, functions as a single unified system. It must maintain consistent quality, pace, growth, and time tracking. This requires synchronized efforts and its time tracking should be as precise and reliable as a Swiss watch. Therefore, it is not feasible for every lawyer to have their own style of time tracking.

So, the second myth occurs when a lawyer says, "This tool isn't for me. I track my time differently. I have my unique style!". One can manage their time in a unique way, but in a law firm, where time tracking is the central mechanism, having a unique time tracking style simply means that they are not aligned with one of the most crucial components of the firm.

To understand the potential improvements in time tracking and getting rid of the concept of "unique style time tracking" let's compare it with another crucial skill of an efficient expert where people found their own "imperfectly efficient" approach - touch typing. Touch typing is a common keyboard typing style, known as the 10-finger typing method, which is recognized as the most efficient in terms of speed and accuracy. To master it, you will need approximately 12 hours of training. Trying to implement this in a law firm with 1,000 lawyers will bring up significant challenges and a high level of resistance. Most of the lawyers would claim that their unique typing style is fast enough, questioning why they should learn a standard method. However, integrating such standard touch typing into their routine would provide consistency on a global firmwide level.

The situation with time tracking is similar. Many lawyers would resist, asserting that each has their own time-tracking style, that no app or automated billing rules should limit how they track and enter time. Nevertheless, the role of the law firm is to establish a consistent and common time-tracking style, despite this resistance. Unlike touch typing, time tracking is directly connected to the income of the firm and has a bigger impact on the overall progress.

The third myth in legal time tracking is that review is an essential part of the process. In a perfectly working process, reviewing time entries should be merely a formal and unnecessary step. It would be preferable to eliminate the review entirely and replace it with a straightforward approval process. The time tracking process should be so seamless, synchronized, and the guidance so clear and automated, that the need for review becomes obsolete.

Time Tracking on Weekend

To better understand the risks associated with retrospective time tracking, let's consider a few scenarios involving three time entrie recordings.

Scenario 1

On Monday, you had a call with a client that lasted 31 minutes. Now, it's the weekend, and you're trying to remember it.

You check your calendar, which shows a Teams call blocked for 30 minutes. You recall staying until the end, so you think, "That’s 0.5 hours for a client meeting." You don't have time to review the call history for precise timing, which in this case was 31 minutes. Why is this one minute important? There are different methods of rounding work time, often determined by agreements with clients. Some clients prefer or insist on precise billing, like 31 or 32 minutes; others accept rounding up in 5- or 15-minute increments, or the standard consulting increment of tenths of an hour.

If there is an agreement with the client and you ignore one or two minutes, you would be in fact ignoring a whole 5-minute or 15-minute increment. While ethical considerations are important, rounding practices should align with client agreements. If 100 mid-level lawyers, each billing at €500 per hour, miss billing a 5-minute increment just once a day, this would mean 65 missed increments over three months per lawyer and a total of 6,500 missed increments across all of them. The resulting lost revenue would be approximately €270,000.00.

While this might be favorable for clients, a client-centric approach is more about delivering quality rather than simply billing less. If you answered a valuable question during those extra two minutes but didn't bill for it because you didn't have the precise call duration, it will be another minor but significant loss in the firm's revenue.

Solution with Legal Tech

As soon as you open your billing tool, you'll see an automatic entry of 31 minutes based on your attendance at the call. The app is connected to Outlook through an API, retrieving the exact start and end times of the call, as well as when you joined and left. Using the transcript and title of the call, a suitable task description is suggested for your time entry.

You don't need to search for calendar entries or write any text; you simply confirm the pre-created time entry based on your call attendance.

Scenario 2

You've been reviewing a document for approximately an hour, but in reality, it was 1 hour and 14 minutes, and you started your lunch afterward. Now you're sitting in front of your billing tool, trying to recall the details.

It was six days ago, so it's hard to remember clearly. You decide to estimate the workload for the contract review, which feels like a one-hour task, and you bill it for exactly one hour. However, since it doesn't sound very professional to bill an exact full hour for one contract, and it feels like you're just giving an approximate time without tracking accurately, you reduce it by one increment and bill for 55 minutes. Due to false recollection and emotional assessment, you end up losing 4 increments (20 minutes) in your billing and essentially start the write-off process right in the billing stage.

But write-offs are a part of approval, not time tracking. Once you've billed a certain amount, you can't increase it later. In consulting and legal advice, there's always a one-way change in billing: it can only go down. Lawyers who decide the task's cost themselves, rather than accurately tracking the time it took, harm the firm and reduce the budget. Conversely, if you complete a task in 20 minutes instead of the planned hour, you can't bill for an hour. Billing should always reflect the actual workload, so why should 75 minutes be reduced to 55 due to inaccurate time tracking?

Solution with Legal Tech

The tool has access to your screen and app activity, and can see that the document was open for 3 hours. However, any activity related to reading the document indicates that the actual time spent was 1 hour and 12 minutes, which is close to the real time but a few minutes short. The tool suggests the time entry to you, and you can accept it with your own adjustments.

Scenario 3

In the third scenario, you've been in an offline client meeting with two other senior lawyers and one junior lawyer. Now, it's the weekend again, and you open your calendar to find that the meeting was scheduled for 45 minutes. However, you recall that it took longer than that. Because the meeting was offline, there is no Teams chat or call history to consult. It's the weekend, so you don't want to call your colleagues to ask if they remember how long the meeting lasted. Instead, you decide to bill the time shown in the calendar.

Solution with Legal Tech

Even though you haven't tracked your time precisely, your firm uses a Legal Tech tool for time tracking, allowing you to benefit from another feature: sharing time entries. You open the tool and see that the junior lawyer has shared the time entry with you and the others. The entry includes the meeting time, narrative of the entry, actions to be taken, and even the meeting notes. With just one click, you can accept the time entry.

A time tracking tool is an essential component in a lawyer's arsenal that can eliminate a significant portion of administrative work. Features like sharing time entries, using templates, accessing client information, integrating with Teams, Outlook, and other apps, adopting a systematic and centralized approach to narratives, and automating the validation of time entries based on billing guidelines are the minimal requirements for a time tracking app. These features guide timekeepers and prevent them from making obvious mistakes in their tracking process.