CBA Record March-April 2023

YOUNG LAWYERS SECTION: ADVICE FOR YOUNG LAWYERS

Why the Art of Billing is Crucial By Paige N. Fox

T hrough the first seven years of prac tice, I have struggled with billing. It is a topic of almost daily discussion amongst friends and colleagues. Why? Every single lawyer in private practice has struggled with billing at some point in their career. I graduated law school in 2015 with a public interest certificate and zero interest in practicing in big law. So, every horror story my friends shared about billable hours simply was not on my radar at that time. After law school, I joined a small law firm with three total attorneys and no billable hours requirement. Instead, for these first six-plus years of practice, I had a revenue requirement, which mandated that I bring in a total of at least my salary multiplied by three annually. After almost seven years of practicing law, I came face-to-face with my first bill able hours requirement when I joined a mid-sized firm in May 2022. Over these last seven months, I learned a lot from the chaotic adventure that is billing. Below are six suggestions to consider when entering a firm with a billable hour requirement. 1. Adjust how you practice from day one and delegate non-billable tasks, because billable hours force you to be efficient. Pay close attention to how many hours of a standard workday you actually spend on billable work. Attorneys at smaller firms often devote significant portions of their day to non-billable or administrative work. Last year, at a small firm, I person ally filed pleadings and made copies, so the client expected to get billed for it at a lawyer’s billing rate. Now, at a mid-sized firm, I can and should delegate this work because I cannot bill for it. I should del egate this type of task to an administra tive assistant to free up my limited time to spend on hours that can be billed to a client. Overall, I suggest first figuring out

3. Enter your time daily when con temporaneous time entries are not possible. The typical alternatives to entering your time contemporaneously or daily are to do so weekly or monthly. Based on expe rience, I do not recommend entering time only weekly or monthly, as it often can create issues with capturing all of the time you incurred. One year, my coworker and I spent our entire New Year’s Eve at the office entering time we had not captured from that month. That was the night I stopped entering my time weekly and started doing so daily. 4. Find what works for you while also realizing you will need to adapt when working on another attorney’s file. One of the most fascinating, and frustrat ing, things I notice while working with so many attorneys daily is that every single one of us records time and structures bills a little differently. Not only do billing preferences vary based on the day, client, payor, and file type, but sometimes they are literal opposites. One morning I spoke with a partner who expressed how much he liked the detailed descriptions I used

what work is billable and what work is non-billable. Next, delegate the non-bill able work to a legal assistant or law clerk whenever possible. Legal assistants, sup port staff, and law clerks are lifelines for attorneys. I would be lost daily without all our firm’s incredible support staff. So, when you delegate work to these unsung heroes, respect their valuable time, do so politely, and thank them! 2. Enter your time contemporaneously. Before having a billable hour requirement, I used a legal pad and manually wrote the start time, kept dutiful notes on billing activities, and then posted the end time. Later, at the end of each day, I entered a stack of billings into the timekeeper. That worked for several years. However, once I joined my new firm with a robust billable hour requirement, I realized that entering my time at the end of the day took at least an hour each day and prevented me from using that hour on billable matters. To be as efficient as possible, I suggest using a billing timer and then actually entering your time as contemporaneously as pos sible, which should include contempora neously typing out the task descriptions.

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