Time Entry: The Dreaded Task
For many in the legal profession, time entry is a constant source of frustration. This task, often done after the fact, involves recalling and recording work long after it's completed. The delay between performing the work and documenting it can result in significant inaccuracies, leading to the risk of overcharging or undercharging clients.
How Did We Get Here?
The shift began with the digital transformation of law firms, as corporate legal departments started insisting on hourly billing rather than fixed retainers. According to William Ross in "The Honest Hour: The Ethics of Time-Based Billing Attorneys," early adopters of time tracking and hourly billing saw increased profits compared to those on fixed fees. This led to a widespread acceptance of the practice. The turning point came in 1975 when the U.S. Supreme Court banned minimum fixed fee plans promoted by bar associations, cementing the billable hour as the standard for decades.
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Why Has Time Entry Become So Reviled?
The answer lies in the rising rates. From the early 2000s until the 2008 financial crisis, legal fees soared well beyond inflation. As costs climbed, clients grew increasingly wary of being overcharged or billed for work that seemed to lack value. The post-crisis era of corporate austerity amplified this concern. Legal departments started employing legal operations specialists, and law firms brought in pricing professionals. These legal operations teams implemented Outside Counsel Guidelines to define value and used e-billing software for enforcement. This evolution points to a deeper issue: a crisis of trust.
The result for lawyers and other fee earners is a demand for meticulous time entry. Billers and partners must rigorously adhere to outside counsel guidelines, leading to increased write-downs and write-offs of time. This added scrutiny has transformed time entry from a disliked chore to a universally reviled task.
Hybrid Work Has Intensified Time Entry Challenges
The rise of hybrid work has exacerbated the issue. With fewer people in the office, the number of meetings and communication channels has exploded. What used to be quick, in-person queries like “Can you respond to x?” or “What are you working on?” have now shifted to chat messages and additional calls. Unplanned meetings, calls, and brainstorming sessions were often missed in time logs, and hybrid work has only increased these occurrences. Consequently, time entry has become more laborious, leading to lost revenue from unrecorded billable hours.
Restoring Trust While Easing the Burden and Boosting Revenue
At Belt, our focus has been on creating a unified calendar that integrates tasks, meetings, and deadlines into one central hub. Our smart AI communication monitoring for emails and chats ensures that you never miss an important request again. We also offer an Outlook sidebar to swiftly schedule or delegate incoming requests, streamlining your workflow.
By adopting our product, you gain access to a single interface that allows you to manage your planned tasks and meetings effortlessly. Any impromptu Microsoft Teams calls are automatically imported as “Huddles,” and we track the time spent in these meetings and calls. Belt seamlessly integrates this information across enterprise projects, collaboration systems, and CRM, ensuring all your client activity is captured and linked efficiently.
Belt simplifies your end-of-day routine by allowing you to:
- Review the tasks completed that day and identify what still needs attention.
- Mark your actuals and add matter tags to your tasks, huddles, and meetings.
- Push all this information to your time entry system to refine narratives and submit your time.
- Plan your next day, beginning with any unfinished tasks or projects.
- This streamlined process ensures nothing is overlooked and prepares you for a productive day ahead.
Using Belt as your calendar and work planner simplifies the process of preparing your time entries and minimizes the risk of missing or forgetting entries. This efficient system reduces the amount of time you spend each day on time entry, allowing you to focus more on your work and less on administrative tasks.
The use of Belt can also help address the client trust issue. As clients become aware that your firm uses an in-the-flow approach to capture daily activities rather than relying on retrospective entries, they may begin to relax some of the stringent Outside Counsel Guideline rules. While the legal industry is notoriously slow to change, this shift could foster greater trust and flexibility between firms and their clients.
Organize Your Work, Execute Efficiently, Capture Everything – With Belt. Sign up for a free trial now.
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