For a lawyer, time management is an area of the highest importance as it affects all other aspects of their work. Time influences productivity, profitability, client satisfaction, and more. And legal work is constantly restrained by time – attorneys have to meet deadlines, prep for court or hearing dates, and more.
Considering this central role of time, one would think that tracking what lawyers do with their time would be a top law firm priority. Yet, many law firms are yet to move to more accurate forms of time tracking. They’re still pushing pen and paper and Excel, and managing their time in traditional, error-prone ways.
In today’s blog post, we explain why efficient time tracking is essential for good lawyer time management.
4 Reasons Why Time Tracking Is So Important For Lawyer Time Management
Here are some of the ways that time tracking can enhance law firm operations:
Supports Billing And Invoicing
Billing is an essential process in financial and client management. If you work at a per-hour rate, having a good system to track the time you spend on work is vital. Time tracking tells you how long you’ve spent working on a project and how much you should charge. It is also an unquestionable record of work done by the attorney, so there can be no argument over how much the client must pay.
As a result, having a digital time tracking system ensures that all your billing and invoicing remain accurate. No guessing when you worked or how much you should invoice for. No undercharging or overcharging for your service.
Amberlo’s automatic inclusion and calculation of time and fees mean you won’t have any billing errors. Plus, with invoicing templates available in over 180 currencies and 16 languages, Amberlo can make international billing effortless.
Creates Accessible Records Of Work Completed
Tracking is not just important as a record of income. It can also be a convenient tool to store and monitor tasks completed. Having access to all hours logged and the correlating tasks gives you a good scope of a project as it is ongoing and once it is completed.
Essentially, you can create a project or case archive for your firm as a form of record-keeping.
Improves Pricing And Case Estimation
Having a record of time spent on every case and the tasks involved in project completion empowers your case management. You can better estimate how long you will spend on similar projects in the future.
This also gives you better control over your pricing as you can compare past cases and provide more accurate estimates. Since clients like to get a sense of the cost of your service, this can help develop client satisfaction and enhance your customer management.
Streamlines Team Productivity Management
Finally, time tracking can give you insight into how your team works. What do your attorneys spend most of their time on? Which tasks are the most time-sensitive? How long do your lawyers spend on respective tasks or activities in each case?
You can answer all these questions and more by prioritizing time tracking. With this understanding of how your attorneys manage their time and workflow, you can create workflow systems to help them speed up processes.
Time tracking is also an excellent way to ensure your employees have enough time for each task and aren’t overloaded with work. It is an objective way to measure workload and employee capacity. It can also help identify flaws in time management and efficiency so you can introduce measures to improve them.
Tips For Better Lawyer Time Management
Most firms understand the benefits of time tracking and good time management. The problem arises in finding viable and practical methods of working with time well.
Here are some tips for improving your firm’s time management:
- Know your billable vs non-billable activities
- Use effective email management software
- Create daily tasks or to-do lists
- Ensure workflow visibility, so everybody knows the progress on a case
- Encourage easy file access through cloud document storage, so lawyers never have to wait for files
- Log all times immediately
- Use a reliable time tracking and billing software
At Amberlo, we make it possible to do all of these and more through our comprehensive law firm management software. We provide a time tracking solution that works hand-in-hand with other areas of your firm, including matter management, expense tracking, and more.
We also have a client portal where clients can also keep track of matter progress and details and communicate with their attorney.
Conclusion
Time is a fundamental role player in-process and matter management. And, perhaps most importantly for a successful law firm, it is a constraint that affects your bottom line. Amberlo solution makes time management easy! Get in touch with us today for a demo and see how we can help streamline your legal operations.