Every six minutes

How a unit works

Most firms bill in six-minute units, written as 0.1 of an hour. A two-minute phone call is 0.1, and so is a five-minute email. Under the common round-up rule, a 14-minute call becomes 0.3, because each started unit counts.

Check how your firm rounds and what your costs agreement allows, because practice varies. Filebird records time in 0.1h units, so every entry is already on the same scale by the time it reaches a bill.

A quick reference for the round-up rule:

• 1 to 6 minutes: 0.1

• 7 to 12 minutes: 0.2

• 13 to 18 minutes: 0.3

• 19 to 24 minutes: 0.4

• 25 to 30 minutes: 0.5

Rounding is not padding. It is the convention most costs agreements describe, and it exists because nobody can record a two-minute call more precisely in practice. What matters is that the firm applies it consistently and that the client was told about it at the start.

Some firms set a minimum entry for certain tasks, such as 0.2 for any letter. If yours does, make sure the costs agreement says so and the narratives still describe what was done. A minimum is a pricing decision, and clients accept it more readily when it is written down.

Where the time goes missing

When I ran billing at a 30-lawyer firm, the gap between hours worked and hours recorded was rarely in the long tasks. It was in the short ones nobody wrote down.

• Phone calls taken between meetings

• Emails answered on a phone after hours

• Reviewing a document someone else drafted

• File notes written up the next day

• Quick questions from a junior lawyer about a matter

Each one is 0.1 or 0.2. Across a week, a lawyer can lose two or three hours this way without noticing.

Time also goes missing in the middle of long tasks. A lawyer drafting for three hours takes a call on another matter, answers two emails and gets back to the draft. The draft gets recorded. The call and the emails often do not, or they get folded into the drafting entry on the wrong matter.

After-hours work is the worst affected. A lawyer who answers six emails from the couch at 9pm rarely opens a timesheet to record them, and by the morning the detail has gone. Those emails are often the most urgent and the most valued by the client.

Record it while it is happening

Time recorded on the day is more accurate and easier to describe. Time reconstructed on a Friday afternoon is usually rounded down, described vaguely and queried more often by clients.

1. Start a timer from the matter when you open it, not after you finish.

2. When you file an email to the matter from Outlook or Gmail, add the time in the same step.

3. Before you leave each day, open your day view and fill the gaps between entries.

4. Write for the client who will read the invoice: “Reviewed lease and advised on break clause”, not “Review”.

The email step does the most work. Most short tasks start or finish in an inbox, so pairing the filing with the time entry catches the units that would otherwise vanish. Once it is a habit, it adds about ten seconds per email.

Timers help most on long, interrupted tasks, because they make the interruptions visible. Pause the timer when a call comes in, record the call on its own matter and resume. It feels fussy for a week. After that it is simply how the day is recorded.

The five-minute end-of-day check

The daily check is the habit that recovers the most time. Do it before you leave, while the day is still in your head.

1. Open your day view and look for gaps between entries longer than about 15 minutes.

2. Check your sent email for the day. Every reply to a client or the other side is a candidate for an entry.

3. Check your call log against your entries.

4. Look at your diary for meetings that ran long or that you did not record at all.

5. Finish any entry with a one-word narrative. “Call” becomes “Call with client re settlement date” while you still remember it.

Most lawyers find two or three missing entries the first week they try this, and fewer once recording as they go becomes a habit. It takes about five minutes, and at a $350 rate a single recovered 0.1 pays for the time spent.

Descriptions that survive a bill review

A good narrative names the task, the document or person involved, and the outcome. Clients pay for work they can understand. They query entries like “attendance” or “perusal” because they cannot see what they bought.

When we started reviewing narratives before bills went out, our write-offs dropped by about a third. Most of them had been entries the client simply did not understand.

Jess Moreno, Practice Manager, Fairlie & Co.

A useful pattern is verb, object and purpose. Compare these:

• “Email” against “Email to client confirming settlement date and funds required”

• “Review” against “Review lease and note three issues with the break clause”

• “Attendance” against “Call with other side’s solicitor to agree an extension to 14 November”

The longer versions take a few seconds more to write and save a phone call when the invoice arrives. They also make the bill easier for the supervising partner to review, because they can see what each unit bought without opening the file.

Make it a weekly habit

Pick one time each week to compare your recorded hours against your diary. If Tuesday shows four hours recorded and a full day of meetings, the missing entries are still recoverable. By the following month, they usually are not.

Supervising partners can help by looking at team totals every week rather than at month end. A short, regular review is far less awkward than a large write-off conversation.

Practice managers can run the same comparison across the firm once a month, by practice group. A group that records far fewer hours than its diaries suggest usually has a habit to fix, and the fix is the daily routine above.

Avoid leaving the review to month end. By then the diary is a list of meetings you only half remember, and the missing entries get rounded down or dropped to save time. A weekly review is shorter, more accurate and far easier to keep up.

Non-billable time counts too

Record non-billable time as well, in the same units: business development, training, supervision and internal meetings. It does not reach a bill, but it shows where each lawyer’s week went. Without it, a lawyer with low billable hours looks unproductive when they may have spent the week supervising two juniors.

It also makes fixed fees and estimates more accurate. If a matter type always includes a few hours of internal discussion that nobody records, every estimate built on recorded time will be short before the matter starts.

Use a small set of non-billable codes so the totals mean something. Five or six categories are enough for most firms. Twenty categories produce a report nobody reads and entries nobody codes consistently.