Single Ad Example

ARE YOU TRACKING TIME OR IS TIME

TRACKING YOU?

By Eubin Rii

Imagine how much more you would enjoy working throughout the day if you no longer needed to manually keep track of your time and record billable hours. Well, imagine no longer. The technology to track all your activities and time is here.

Op. 93-379 regarding billing professional fees.)

Keeping complete and accurate activity and time records enables you to adhere to the Rules of Professional Conduct and obtain analytics to

measure the performance of your firm. Keeping time records empowers you to determine how much of your day you spend

Keeping track of your time and activities is a necessary evil for the practice of law. Regardless of whether you bill hourly, fixed or flat fee, or on

on billable work, determine staff costs and calculate the profitability of each of your matters. This is especially important for firms that charge on a fixed or flat fee basis, as there is a tipping point at which you no longer are profitable due to the number of hours spent on a client’s matter. The technology now exists to automatically record all your time and activities. In the best case use of automated time and activity tracking technology the application would associate activity to the client’s matter with virtually no user interaction. There’s no need to waste time on administrative non-billable tasks. In addition to automatically tracking your time and activities, your firm should be able to analyze your data to provide you key performance indicators (KPIs) and dashboards (“Firm Insights”) so that you can check the pulse of your firm. KPIs can show you your revenue and profitability metrics, lead analysis, and practice area specific metrics so you can make data driven decisions.

contingency basis, tracking your time is necessary. Rule 1.5 of the Illinois Rules of Professional Conduct provides “[a] lawyer shall not make an agreement for, charge, or collect an unreasonable fee….” Reasonableness is the basis of charging fees and maintaining a record of your activities and time assists you in establishing reasonableness. (See ARDC case In re Neely, M.R. 27514, 2014PR00129 (Sept. 21, 2015), attorney was suspended for two years from the practice of law for misconduct involving dishonesty and unreasonable fees). The best practice of time keeping is contemporaneous timekeeping. Contemporaneous timekeeping is recording your time, activity and associating it to the matter at the time you complete the activity. For example, if you receive a phone call from your client, you track the begin time and end time of the phone call, create a record with the description of the call, and associate it to the matter. But, the most common timekeeping method is reconstructive timekeeping. Reconstructive timekeeping is where you go back in time, at the end of the week or month, to review your file for documents, emails, and events to determine how much time was spent. Unfortunately, reconstructive timekeeping is inherently inaccurate. (See the American Bar Association Formal

Eubin Rii is General Counsel for Smokeball, Inc. 866-668-3206 | www.smokeball.com To learn why the most profitable law firms use Smokeball, please call us or visit our website

LPMT Bits & Bytes | March 2018

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