Time Entry: The Dreaded Task
Any legal professional knows Time Entry is the bane of their existence. It’s a tedious task that is often done after-the-fact in a retrospective manner. Many times, there is a significant enough time gap between when the work is done and when it is recorded. This can lead to potential inaccuracies, as well as over and underbilling clients.
But how did we get to this point?
With the adoption of computers by law firms, corporate legal department started demanding that firms bill by the hour, instead of billing on a fixed retainer basis. In The Honest Hour: The Ethics of Time-Based Billing By Attorneys, scholar William Ross states during the early stages of time entry, lawyers who tracked their time and billed by the hour made more net-profit than lawyers who didn’t - leading to a gradual adoption of this practice by firms globally. By 1975, the United States Supreme Court would outlaw the largely bar association led minimum fixed fee plans, effectively solidifying the shift to the billable-hour for decades to come.
How has time entry become so reviled? The answer is simple, rates. During the early 2000s up to the 2008 financial crisis, rates increased much faster than inflation. As rates have increased, clients have become more sensitive to overbilling and being billed for work that is not perceived to deliver value. Corporate austerity born out of the financial crisis began the trend. Legal departments began hiring the first legal operation roles and law firms the first pricing professional. Legal operations leveraged a combination of Outside Counsel Guidelines to define what was considered value and used e-billing software to enforce it. What this describes is a trust problem.
The impact on lawyers and other fee earners is that they tend to enter their time with much greater detail. Billers and partners must ensure that the outside counsel guidelines are being enforced. Write-downs and write-offs of time increased. This turned time entry from disliked to reviled.
Hybrid Work Has Only Made Time Entry Worse
Hybrid work has only added fuel to the fire. To mediate the fact that individuals are in-office less frequently, the number of meetings and communications media has ballooned. What was once a simple “Can you respond to x?” or “What are you working on?” when people were physically located together in-office, has been supplanted via chat messages and even more calls. Unscheduled meetings, calls and brainstorming sessions have been historically missed when logging time. Hybrid work has only increased them. The result is that time entry is more intensive, and firms are now losing revenue from missing time entries.
Can We Restore Trust While Lowering the Burden and Increase Revenue?
At Belt, we have been focused on building a unified calendar with tasks, meetings and deadlines in one central place, along with smart AI communication monitoring – for email and chats - so you never miss an important request again. We provide an Outlook sidebar to quickly schedule or delegate requests coming into your inbox.
When you adopt our product, we provide a single interface to manage what tasks you plan to do, as well as any meetings you are planning to attend. Any ad hoc Microsoft Teams calls are automatically imported as what we call “Huddles”, and we also track the amount of time spent in Teams meetings and calls. Through Belt, this can all be linked across enterprise projects, collaboration systems and CRM.
Belt also streamlines your end-of-day procedures by empowering you to:
Review your list of what work got done that day and what still needs to be addressed.
Mark your actuals and add matter tags to your tasks, huddle and meetings.
Push everything to your time entry system to clean up the narratives and submit your time.
Plan your next day, starting with any tasks or projects that didn’t get finished.
Adopting Belt as your calendar and work planner simplifies and reduces the effort to prepare your time entries and lowers the risk of missing or forgetting entries. You can reduce the amount of time you spend each day entering your time.
The use of Belt may also offer a tantalizing additional benefit, curing the client trust problem. As clients learn that the firm uses an in-the-flow approach to capture what each person does each day, instead of today’s retrospective approach, they may start backing down on some of the Outside Counsel Guideline rules. This is the hope, as I fully admit the legal industry changes very slowly.
Plan the work. Do the work. Capture the incidental. All with Belt.
To learn more about Belt, or to schedule a demo to see Belt in action, visit belt.ai