How Attorneys Track Their Billable Time — A Case Study
If you are an attorney who really hates trying to keep track of your time for billing — at least you’re not alone.
Since last summer, Chrometa has surveyed over 500 attorneys, many of whom we’ve had live conversations with as well, about their time tracking habits. To sum up their sentiment – tracking time is the worst part of their jobs!
Accounting for Billable Time
First we asked each attorney what percentage of their billable time are they able to account for. In other words, how much legitimate billable time is lost due to interruptions, multi-tasking, and an inability to remember what they did after a few days had gone by?
For folks who make a living billing by the hour, the answers might surprise you. They estimated that, on average, they are able to account for only 67% of their billable time – in other words, attorneys are working 3 hours just to bill 2. And check out the breakdown below – almost 40% of respondents believe they are accounting for less than 60% of their legitimate billable time!
How Attorneys Track Their Time
Next, we asked them how they currently keep track of their time. We found that the classic mental picture of the attorney clicking the stopwatch diligently throughout the day is more of an illusion than a reality!
The majority of respondents said they try to enter their time manually as they go, with nearly a quarter keeping handwritten notes. Less than 15% of attorneys surveyed use a stopwatch. And you can see that the methods being used to track time are really quite varied across the board.
Time Reconciliation Process
Finally, we asked how much time they spend each week trying to reconcile their time. Many cited this to be the most painful part of practicing law. One solo attorney we spoke with said he looks at attorneys who can work on one task for days on end with envy, because it’s easy for them to record time!
On average, the legal professions we surveyed said they spend 2.5 hours each week reconciling their billable time. They often try to piece together a combination of handwritten notes, sent emails, and calendar placeholders, in an effort to reconstruct the past. Many attorneys even spend up to an hour or more each day on this tedious process!
Summary – It’s Not Just You
The good news about these findings is that you’re not alone. You’re not the only one who can’t get a handle on your time…the entire process appears to be fundamentally broken.
My advice: focus on simple, incremental improvements that you can make. Perhaps you can do a little better job tracking time concurrently. Or maybe you can block your time a little better. Or an automatic time tracker may help fill in missing haps.
Whatever you decide, a continuous improvement approach to this problem is probably more practical than trying to solve everything all at once. When situations are this broken, there’s rarely a true “holy grail” waiting around the corner…so just keep trying to improve wherever you can. Little improvements compound on themselves, and can eventually add up in a big way!
