Lawyers and paralegals are busy and have a lot of distractions during the workday that often take them off course when it comes to capturing billable time. The daily pressures of the normal work environment stand as one of the most common obstacles for attorneys and paralegals to properly track their billable time. Unfortunately, many lawyers and paralegals often think of stopping to track time as an unnecessary nuisance, but in fact it should be considered one of the most important things you must do with your workday. To make things worse, the current global pandemic has thrown many of our normal productivities out the window in that we now work from home and different distractors are ever present. Thus, with these additional stressors and distractions, we may be missing even more opportunities to capture billable time, which in turn, results in negative impacts on our businesses and our lives.
This results in many attorneys and paralegals postponing their time tracking and reconstructing it at a later point in the future, often from memory, and often in haste. We call this reconstructive time entry. Faced with an urgent billing need (or billing deadlines set by your firm), you must frantically reconstruct days, weeks or even months’ worth of tasks in retrospect by attempting to remember everything you’ve done. Sadly, this method of time tracking is especially prone to errors, resulting in severely mismanaged bills that could cost your firm hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost revenue and lost billable time.
Accordingly, we strongly advocate the concept of contemporaneous timekeeping which is defined as simultaneously recording your time as you complete each job or task at hand during your workday. In practice, it stands as the complete opposite of what you may be doing now, which I will call reconstructive timekeeping (as described above). Contemporaneous time entry should ensure that your time entries hover near 100 percent accuracy without any need for attorneys to guestimate how much time they’ve logged for a job. And, as mentioned before, in the era of COVID-19 and all of the upheaval that the virus has thrown at us over the last 8 months, capturing your billable time accurately and contemporaneously is even more important because additional stressors are distracting us making reconstructive time entry even more difficult.
Still looking for some answers or additional tips to capture your time contemporaneously? Affinity is here to help. If you need assistance or have question, please contact AffinityConsulting Group by calling 877-676-5492, or simply request a consultation.