Legal departments are not only dealing with only the law. Enterprises now have in-house legal teams that are expected to work and add value to the core business goals. The business functions of law practice involve prompt billing, invoice tracking and timekeeping, online payments, schedule appointments, document management and much more. With a practice management software, it becomes possible to improve billable hours and manage cases as well as client records efficiently.
Let us first understand what billable hours mean. In simple terms, billable hours may be explained the time invested by an employee for an employer to finish a client’s work.
Lawyers keep track of the time on their own and submit them for approval before passing it on to clients. The methods of tracking may vary but the general principle remains the same; invoicing for every manual hour spent on the work. It is highly possible that very often bill details may get overlooked and lawyers miss out on certain tasks resulting in missed earning opportunities. Integrating the administrative functions by adopting an automated tool is vital to run modern law firms.
Benefits of using an automated tool for tracking billable hours :
1. Efficient allocation of resources
2. Retrieve, access and store documents on a safe and secure mode
3. Draw insights on billing and expenses
4. Improve billable hours so that no details are missing
The American Bar Association reports that failing to track billable time immediately causes a 20% drop in the billable time.
It is, therefore, imperative that both premier law firms or other growing law firms have proper mechanism to track activities and precisely bill them on time. In a bid to provide better services law firms stand a great chance in winning the confidence of its clients by providing better transparency in billing, time tracking methods and prompt accounting methods.
It therefore goes without saying that law firms must adopt and use fair and ethical billing mechanism so that each task is accounted for, and no opportunity is lost.
What it means to improve your billable hours?
Improving billing hours means having a of billing method where every aspect of the service is accounted for, tracked on a routine basis and billed for at the end of the billing cycle. Typically, billing hours involves time committed for litigation or advisory matters. Billing details should also involve details of filing fees, court reporter cost, service of process fees, travel expenses, providing legal opinions, drafting letters, etc., pertaining to the legal relation between the client and the law firm.
If tracking billable hours is critical, keeping a check on non-billable hours is equally vital for all law departments. They are important for the growth of the overall business that involves meeting stakeholders, client development, networking and administrative duties.
Investment in legal learning and education, may not add-on to the bottom-line, but is crucial for long term sustenance and professional development. Therefore, non-billing activities are as necessary and as important as the billable hours.
Compensation systems for lawyers work well since they aim to incentivize and recognize the consistency in performance. While the compensation strategy is directly related to the hourly billing, there is also a need felt for consistency in the overall process.
Partner hours and billing rates vary modestly across different law firms, but in any which ways, lawyers will be drawn towards taking up more substantive legal work and develop networking to reach out to more clientele. Whether for compensation or hourly billing method, having a software tool enables calendaring, tracking lawyer work hours, and overall output of individual lawyers.
With an increasing number of law firms adopting integrated solutions to track time and manage their billable hours, the focus is two-fold:
How do we help you?
RazorLex by Practiceleague is a time-bound solution for a host of issues that legal teams face as a result of mismanagement of bills and inadequacies caused due to time-tracking.