Time travels in a similar staggered pattern to a river that meanders along its trip until eventually meeting up with an open water body. Sometimes it flows too swiftly and sometimes barely at all. Time is of the essence for anyone considering a career in law. Time management is the process of planning and managing the amount of time spent on a particular task. Time management is accomplished by time tracking. On the other hand, time tracking has yet to capture the attention of lawyers as a significant concern.
Billable hours in law firms
The majority of law firms and attorneys bill their clients hourly. As a result, to ensure correct legal billing, you must track every second of your work. Work hours tracking also provides attorneys with information into their productivity, allowing them to manage their time better. Manual timekeeping with Excel or Google Sheets timesheets, on the other hand, can be error-prone and time-consuming. That is why both large and small legal firms use time monitoring software: these solutions aid timekeeping, case management, client billing, administrative activities, and workforce planning.
Whether you’re a large or small law firm or a lone practitioner, efficient planning and administration can boost production and efficiency dramatically. The most severe disadvantage of poor time management is the loss of billable hours.
WHAT IS TIME TRACKING?
Time tracking is how organizations keep track of their workers’ working hours. This project or job hours assessment will ensure that personnel will be reimbursed appropriately.
Time entries aren’t only for payroll; they’re also a secure means for managers to track where their employees’ time is going and how long it takes them to finish a task. Once you’ve determined which jobs take the most time, you may consider if that time was effectively spent. The most time-consuming jobs aren’t always the ones that take the most significant effort or provide the most benefit. Quite often, the opposite is true.
WHY TO USE TIME TRACKING SOFTWARE?
Time tracking software is one of the most widely used apps in the business world today. Its use benefits many industries, businesses, and individuals, regardless of their size. It has so many benefits that making a comprehensive list would take too long. In the following sections of this post, we’ll go deeper into them. Time tracking software is used for a variety of applications. The primary reason is, of course, to keep track of how much time it will spend on work. But that’s not all. Many features can be found in time tracking software.
Project managers, executives, and freelancers use time tracking software to properly charge their clients, make invoices and reports, and allocate time and resources in the workplace, depending on their specific needs. Above all, this type of software is used to track time spent on particular tasks, monitor staff activities, increase productivity, and keep on top of work through effective time management.
TIME TRACKING AND TIME MANAGEMENT:
So, why do legal professionals have such mixed feelings about time tracking and management? The answer is pretty straightforward, and it has to do with the system’s established mindsets. Regrettably, we are enslaved by our old views of law as a means to an end rather than a means to an end.
One of the many invoicing methods law firm’s use is billing clients by the hour. The majority of law firms have yet to abandon ‘pen and paper’ for time monitoring and management.
The following are some of the inexorable drawbacks of the “pen and paper” method:
- The documentation required is incredibly time-consuming.
- They might not always be correct. Most law firms require their attorneys to complete a ‘timesheet.’ This sheet keeps track of how much time you spend at work. Lawyers frequently fill out timesheets at the end of the day or after several days. The human mind is naturally fickle, and it is possible to forget specific details.
- Security hazards exist in the paperwork. A variety of factors, such as fire or water spillage, could threaten such documents.
Because the legal profession is one of the oldest and is primarily a tight profession, many lawyers and law firms are wary of adopting digitalization for fear of security breaches and high costs. On the other hand, legal professionals frequently waste at least a third of their billable hours on non-law-related activities. Legal practitioners must have a strong understanding of the law, and it is not their strong suit to conduct administrative tasks. It would be significantly more satisfying to work on improving their legal knowledge.
WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OF TRACKING TIME FOR LAW FIRMS?
Law companies frequently bill by the hour, necessitating the use of law firm time tracking software right away.
Whether you’re a significant law company or merely trying to figure out how to run a small law business more efficiently, you need to keep your billable hours from dwindling owing to operational inefficiencies.
Remember how some lawyers recreate time by looking through calendars, emails, and phone logs? Technological tools will automatically perform this for you and offer you a list of system interactions activities.
This activity is a timeline of events. While lawyers must still go through and designate activities as billable time entries, it is far easier and faster than going through hundreds or even thousands of sent emails. Additional capabilities will emphasize actions related to chargeable concerns, speeding up the reconstruction process even more.
Depending on the preferences of a law firm, these technologies can give a degree of information that increases billing accuracy. For example, the list can keep track of how long a document was open on a lawyer’s screen – or how much time they spent in a legal research tool or another online resource.
TYPES OF TIME TRACKING:
In general, employee time monitoring provides a more objective, deeper insight into your business, to make better decisions. Personal time monitoring should not be confused with project time tracking. The following is the distinction between the two.
1. PERSONAL TIME TRACKING:
Several software options aim to make tracking your digital time easier. RemoteDesk is an example of a program that can measure your digital time across many devices. What websites and applications do you use the most, and how much do you use them? The time is subsequently classified, and essential insights and a productivity score are offered. Using this score, you may compare your workday from week to week, learn from your mistakes, and adjust your routine accordingly.
Those solutions are fantastic for personal time monitoring or small teams, but they aren’t yet scalable or efficient enough for a group of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people.
2. PROJECT TIME TRACKING:
Time tracking directly on tasks, on the other hand, is a better alternative for bigger firms. This is most often done in project- and resource-management solutions. They make it easy to manage all of your work across projects and the company, giving you and your team vital insights into how to better manage time in the future.
BENEFITS OF USING TIME TRACKING SOFTWARE:
These are just a few of the reasons why service businesses don’t keep track of time. It acts as an additional administrative nuisance, as well as a technique to suffocate your team’s creativity and focus. But the truth is that time tracking has a slew of advantages for your company. And, when done right, it doesn’t lead to micromanagement or suffocation of creative thinking.
1. KEEP EMPLOYEES ON TRACK:
Do you find that your staff is frequently unsure about what they should do next? Or are you taking things lightly when you have a tight deadline to meet? Do you find that your employees are regularly unsure about what to do next? Or do you take things for granted when you’re on a tight deadline?
With time tracking, your team will be able to take control of their task. Employees can track how much time they spend on each assignment and see how well they do. They might make time tracking a personal challenge by beating their previous time. Getting your employees involved in their productivity encourages them to take responsibility for their work and schedules.
2. IMPROVE YOUR ESTIMATES:
Getting off on the right foot with your clients starts with accurate quotations. You’ll be able to adapt and enhance your quotes if you keep reliable information on how long each sort of job takes.
If you use time tracking software, you may generate reports on various jobs and the time it takes to perform them in seconds. Improvements to your quotations can then be put into effect right away.
3. KEEP TRACK OF CONTRACTS:
When working with freelancers or other contractors, you must keep a close check on their workload and hours to avoid blowing your budget.
Make sure your contractors use the exact timesheets as your employees. Maintaining an accurate record of hours spent ensures that you only pay for work that is complete and allows you to track the performance of different contractors and assign work to the appropriate personnel.
4. PRIORITIZE PROJECTS:
You may make schedule modifications with a time tracking system’s calendar, milestones, and staff allocation capabilities. These properties of time tracking software allow you to re-allocate hours and alter deadlines easily for high-priority tasks. Your team can readily check the projected amount of hours for each step of a project as well as its current status.
5. REVIEW TEAM PERFORMANCE:
When it comes to yearly performance evaluations, it’s a good idea to base discussions on a precise set of facts. You may pull data on individual employees and compare them to the rest of the team, which you can address during their performance review.
It may also help you uncover strengths to accentuate and shortcomings to improve on by allowing your team members to see how their performance compares to others.
Just don’t fall into the trap of using time as the only criterion for evaluating performance. It is only one element among many; quality of work and providing value to clients are equally critical.
6. IDENTIFY AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT:
When doing a productivity audit as part of your continuous improvement plan, one thing to look for is areas and activities that seem to take longer than others about each project. If everyone on your team is having trouble sticking to deadlines for specific tasks, it might be a sign that a procedure needs to be tweaked.
7. REWARD EXCELLENCE:
Many employees, particularly those who aren’t used to time tracking, are concerned that recording their hours may make them appear slacker. Tracking of working hours allows you to reward the efficient employees accordingly.
Conclusion
It may be appropriate to explore a promotion if someone routinely outperforms their objectives. Similarly, friendly time-based competitions or challenges can encourage employees to push themselves. It’s all about recording data in your firm regarding time tracking.
Because virtual time management is still a relatively new idea, we recommend investing in a decent time management application to stay ahead of the curve. Time management implies a level of discipline that current and prospective clients may find appealing and comforting. Finally, you wouldn’t waste any of your valuable billable hours. Time Tracking is critical to a company’s financial health, but it’s also one of the least fun administrative and legal jobs. People, policy, and technology are all used by savvy businesses to highlight the significance of timely input while making the process a bit simpler.
