In the law practice industry, lawyers should have a clear understanding of what constitutes billable and non-billable hours. Billable hours include all the time they spend working on matters, i.e. time that their clients pay for. Non-billable hours include administrative tasks, timekeeping and other errands, not related to clients. As long as time tracking is a part of non-billable activities, law practitioners show less interest in timekeeping. However, the consequences can hurt their and the firm’s income like in the following example:
This example illustrates the importance of accurate lawyer time tracking. At actiTIME, we’ve got law firms and individual consultants among our clients, so we’d like to show you how actiTIME streamlines lawyer time tracking and how to fine-tune this time tracker to never miss a billable second and make time tracking an automated and hassle-free process.
6 Tips on How to Improve Lawyer Time Tracking with actiTIME
1. Create Billable & Non-Billable Tasks
In actiTIME, you can define billable and non-billable tasks in the Types of Work interface. For billable tasks, you can define hourly rates, run reports, generate bills and invoices. What makes this feature especially useful for lawyer time tracking is that you can set up hourly rates according to particular lawyers and attorneys, clients and tasks.
Pro tip: Ask your staff to capture billable and non-billable time. This information allows you to keep track of activities inside the law firm, identify time sinks and find more opportunities to generate more revenue.
2. Customize Work Structure
actiTIME offers a three-level hierarchy that you can customize for your own needs. The default level structure goes as “Customer / Project / Task,” but you can adjust it according to your needs.
Pro tip: According to our clients, most law firms prefer the “Client / Case / Task” structure.
3. Create Custom Fields for Tasks
Many of the law firms among our clients require Litigation Codes (UTBMS codes) and Practice Areas fields to review case profitability by areas or communicate codes for invoicing. actiTIME allows you to add these or any other codes and indicators to tasks using custom data fields.
Practice Areas and Litigation Codes are not default task parameters in actiTIME, but you can add these or any other to see them in reports and use them for data sorting
Pro tip: If you don’t need to apply custom fields across all your clients, cases or projects, you can create a default parameter that will be assigned to new tasks at the top of the custom field list in the Settings (see the “None” value in the Litigation Code field in some tasks above.
4. Run Analytics & Reports
With types of work and work structure defined, you can use the logged time to build charts and run reports. Our clients from the law practice industry prefer Billing Summary and Cost of Work reports.
Billing Summary Report
Billing Summary report displays time reported for billable and non-billable activities and billable amounts calculated on the basis of assigned hourly rates.
Cost of Work Report
Cost of Work report displays costs calculated for working and leave hours reported by the selected users. Costs are based on hourly user rates.
Time-Track Report
The Time-Track Report offers a comprehensive analysis of how your team members allocate their time across projects and tasks within a specified period. The report also allows you to visualize and group the data and gain valuable insights and generate present meaningful reports for your customers.
Time-Track In Detail Report
With the Time-Track In Detail report, you can learn what your team and particular employees have been working on and for how long. You can group the data by date range, customers, matters and tasks. If you enable the comments option in the report settings, you will see time log notes left by employees.
Pro tip: As a law firm leader or manager, you may enjoy Billing Summary and Cost of Work reports to keep track of billable and non-billable amounts. Consider using a Time-Track In Detail report to review how work time is distributed across employees, clients and tasks.
5. Track Time From Anywhere
Some lawyers and attorneys charge by the hour, while some bill in increments of an hour. In any case, every billable second matters for law firms and legal professionals personally. actiTIME allows to track time in three ways: using timesheet browser software, Chrome timer extension and mobile apps. Let’s see how law firms can use them effectively.
Online Timesheet Software
Timesheet software is the key interface of actiTIME. There, your employees can easily create or add predefined tasks from the list to their weekly timesheet, track time against them, review their total working time and overtime hours, change task status and use leave statuses if this functionality is turned on.
Online timesheet interface in actiTIME where every user can select task parameters
they want to see in their timesheets
Pro tip: If your team of legal professionals bill their clients in small increments, it’s very important that their clients know how they spend every billable minute. Establish a rule in your law firm to accompany every time log with detailed descriptions of what’s been accomplished. You can see these comments in reports and billings.
Calendar view
If you’d like to visualize your weekly work, you can switch from Timesheet view to the Calendar interface displaying your work in time blocks put on daily timelines. Create new time blocks by entering start and end times of the tasks. Adjust their duration by dragging its borders or change their time and date by dragging time blocks inside the days or across the week.
Weekly timeline interface in actiTIME where you can track time by entering start and end times of tasks, manage and review time blocks across the week
Timeline view is a great interface for both full-time and part-time workers. It prioritizes visualization of work hours, specified in the settings for each user: the start of work day hour + its duration, making every minute tracked outside of this period calculated as overtime. Another advantage of the Calendar view is that you can get access to a new time report where work across users, clients, projects and tasks is displayed with time periods and time entry comments – information that is often necessary for clients and investors or is required by law.
Pro tip: Manual overtime entry is also allowed and can be turned on in the settings. If you don’t use the Timesheet or Calendar interface, you can turn it off in the settings to keep your interface clean.
Chrome Timer App
If your team works behind their desks the whole day, they’ll enjoy actiTIME browser extension with a stopwatch and a list of open tasks to choose from. Track billable time right from the browser and switch between the tasks in a few clicks.
Pro tip: Make it a rule in your team that your legal professionals use their browser extension timer to capture billable and non-billable time. Create a separate non-billable task for time tracking that your employees could use after they completed a task to switch to their timesheets and fill in the time log comments.
Time Tracking Mobile App
Many legal professionals often work away from their desks and outside their offices. Most of them answer client calls or reply to emails in a car or from home. With a mobile time-tracking app, you can use a stopwatch or log time manually against tasks rather than recollect your day later with less accuracy.
It also allows you to:
- Keep all your information updated across all devices by effortlessly syncing your data with the web account.
- Gain a comprehensive overview of your daily, weekly, or monthly activities, enabling you to analyze time spent on each task.
- Simplify task management by creating, editing, and organizing tasks by projects and clients.
Pro tip: Track your time right away. Tomorrow you won’t remember what you did today in enough detail to report it in 6-minute or 10-minute intervals.
6. Feel Certain That Your Data is Secure
If you use actiTIME Online (learn if you need to switch to actiTIME Self-Hosted), your data is stored in our data center that uses an encrypted connection, firewall security and corresponding security certificates. We also back up the data daily and store recent database copies in case you need to restore your data.
Lawyer Time Tracking with actiTIME
Legal professionals tend to log their time the next day or at the end of the week, while every missing billable minute leads to thousands of dollars losses for law firms. In the legal industry where every billable minute matters, you need a reliable time tracking solution with time entry comments, analytics and reports, billing features that provide detailed work descriptions to clients.
If your team of legal professionals has never used lawyer time tracking systems before, they may feel resistant to implementing new software into their routines. Hold a training meeting, establish timekeeping rules, create a non-billable task for time tracking routines. Join other law firms among our clients or book a product demo to see if actiTIME is a good fit for your business.
