Time Tracking Tips for Attorneys: Maximize Billable Hours

Time is the primary product a law firm sells, yet most attorneys are remarkably bad at tracking it. Studies suggest that lawyers who reconstruct their time at the end of the day lose an average of 10 to 15 percent of their billable work. For an attorney billing 1,800 hours per year at $300 per hour, that represents $54,000 to $81,000 in lost annual revenue. Multiply that across a firm and the numbers become staggering.

Improving your time tracking discipline is one of the highest-return investments you can make in your practice. It requires no new clients, no additional marketing spend, and no change in your hourly rate. You simply capture the value of work you are already doing.

Track Time Contemporaneously

The most important rule of time tracking is also the simplest: record your time as you work, not after. Human memory degrades rapidly. By the end of the day, you have forgotten short phone calls, quick email exchanges, and brief document reviews that individually seem insignificant but collectively add up to substantial billable time.

Practical ways to track contemporaneously:

• Use a running timer in your practice management software for every task
• Keep a notepad or sticky note on your desk for quick entries if you cannot use the timer
• Set hourly reminders on your phone to log any unrecorded time
• Enter time before switching tasks so the previous activity is fresh in your mind

The transition to contemporaneous tracking feels tedious for the first week. After that, it becomes habit, and you will immediately notice an increase in your recorded hours.

Use Multiple Timers

Modern practice management platforms like Clio, PracticePanther, and TimeSolv allow you to run multiple timers simultaneously or switch between them with a single click. This feature is essential for attorneys who frequently jump between matters throughout the day.

Set up your workspace so that switching timers is effortless:

• Pin your most active matters to a quick-access bar
• Use keyboard shortcuts if your software supports them
• Start a new timer before answering any call so the time is captured automatically
• Review running timers at lunch and end of day to catch any that were left on accidentally

Write Descriptive Time Entries

Vague time entries like "research" or "correspondence" invite client disputes and make it harder to justify your fees. Descriptive entries demonstrate the value of your work and reduce billing objections.

A strong time entry includes:

• What you did: the specific task performed
• Why you did it: the purpose or case context
• What was produced or accomplished: the outcome or deliverable

Compare these examples:

• Weak: "Legal research - 1.5 hours"
• Strong: "Researched state court standards for summary judgment motions in breach of contract cases; identified three supporting precedents for motion brief - 1.5 hours"

The second entry takes only a few extra seconds to write but dramatically improves the client's understanding of the work performed.

Capture All Billable Activities

Many attorneys systematically under-bill by failing to record certain types of work. Common overlooked billable activities include:

• Short phone calls under six minutes
• Email review and response related to client matters
• Travel time to and from court or client meetings
• Waiting time at court for hearings or depositions
• File review when picking up a matter after a gap
• Internal strategy discussions with colleagues about a case

Review your engagement letter to confirm which activities are billable, then make a conscious effort to record every qualifying task. Even two-minute activities recorded in one-tenth of an hour increments add up significantly over a month.

Set Daily and Weekly Targets

Without targets, time tracking becomes an afterthought. Establish a daily billable hour target based on your annual goal and track your progress weekly. Most firms target between 6.5 and 8.0 billable hours per day depending on the attorney's role and seniority.

Break your annual target into manageable chunks:

• Annual target: 1,800 billable hours
• Monthly target: 150 billable hours (assuming two weeks of vacation and holidays)
• Weekly target: 37.5 billable hours
• Daily target: 7.5 billable hours

Review your numbers every Friday. If you are behind target, identify the cause. Was it a slow week for client work, or did administrative tasks crowd out billable time? The answer determines the solution.

Leverage Technology for Passive Time Capture

Some tasks are difficult to track manually, particularly email and document work where you switch between matters rapidly. Passive time capture tools can fill this gap by monitoring your activity in the background and associating it with the correct matter.

Options include:

• Smokeball tracks time automatically based on documents and emails opened
• Clio's mobile app allows quick timer starts from anywhere
• Time tracking browser extensions that log research time on legal databases
• Calendar-based capture that converts appointments into time entries

Passive capture should supplement manual tracking, not replace it. Review automatically captured entries daily to ensure accuracy and add descriptions.

Delegate Time Entry Cleanup to Support Staff

Even with the best habits, time entries often need editing before they appear on an invoice. Descriptions may be abbreviated, entries may need to be consolidated, and block billing may need to be separated into individual tasks for compliance.

A trained legal billing assistant can review and polish your time entries daily, ensuring they are:

• Descriptive enough to withstand client scrutiny
• Properly coded to the correct matter and billing category
• Compliant with client billing guidelines and outside counsel requirements
• Free of block billing that could trigger automatic reductions

This delegation saves attorneys 15 to 30 minutes per day while improving the quality and collectibility of invoices.

Audit Your Billing Process Regularly

Even excellent time tracking loses value if the downstream billing process is broken. Conduct a quarterly billing audit to identify leakage points:

• Are all time entries making it onto invoices, or are some being written off prematurely?
• How long does it take from time entry to invoice delivery?
• What percentage of billed amounts are actually collected?
• Are any clients consistently disputing charges?

Each of these questions may reveal opportunities to recover revenue without increasing your workload.

DocketHire Can Streamline Your Billing Workflow

Accurate time tracking is only half the battle. Turning those entries into clean, compliant invoices requires dedicated attention. DocketHire's legal billing assistants can manage your time entry review, invoice preparation, and collections follow-up so you get paid faster for the work you do. Reach out to DocketHire and let our team handle the billing so you can focus on billable work.