What are billable hours and their importance?

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

Importance of tracking billable hours :

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.

What are non-billable hours?

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.

Adding value to your business using an automated tool

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:

• To achieve and improve billable hours and provide quality time on client case
• Streamline processes and indulge in more value-added activities for clients

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.

• a)  As a robust and integrated platform, RazorLex is an efficient time and billing software that provides timely billing with multi-level billing structure.
• b)  The invoicing and payment tracking feature allows for the availability of final invoices and receivables with a single click. Timesheets, activities, court appearances, tasks, etc., are integrated for timely and automated billing.
• c)  Automatic invoicing for the work done by teams and individual resources can be managed with the time and billing module.
• d)  Draft bills, review and get timely approvals from partners and create timesheets and billing expenses automatically tagged based on the billing mandate given by client.
• e)  Track payments of clients on a real-time basis and send timely reminders for overdue payment to reduce lawyer downtime and quickly turn law practice into a profitable business
• f)  Easily assign, track and manage various tasks for themselves and their teams, while tracking the progress of all assigned responsibilities, being able to set deadlines, automate reminders and receive alerts for all competed tasks.
• g)  Real-time and on-demand Client, Team, Resource, Partner and Office wise reports are made available to help you analyse and grow your practice. Comprehensive reports and graphs with every detail about your firm's productivity and revenue are automatically computed.
• h)  Expenses related to vacation time, travel, court fees, copies, calls, emails, courier and postage fees, and other overheads can be recorded in real-time even from your devices. Out of the pocket expenses can then be automatically tagged and attached to the client invoices.
• i)  Milestone-based payments allows law firms to manage various milestones on each project, work progress, total cost of individuals working on the project, the cost, time, and resource allocation. The Project Management tool allows Law firms to track profitability of projects and clients while allowing for a better control and visibility on each project.

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