As lawyers, scrupulously tracking your billable hours is essential to the success of your business, but admittedly, it can be a draining task. Managing time, invoicing clients, collecting money…it can suck the passion right out of you. Fortunately, there is a better way. Not only can you more efficiently track and bill time, but you can also increase the number of billable hours your firm generates.
Standardize and Simplify
One of the easiest ways to improve your firm’s billable process is to streamline and standardize your time-tracking policy. There should be one standard operating procedure everyone in the firm follows. This reduces confusion and ensures consistency in the way everyone on the team enters their billable hours.
It’s also a good idea to input your billable hours at the end of each day rather than wait until the end of the week or month. If you already have enough trouble remembering what you had for breakfast on a given day, how are you supposed to accurately recall how much time you spent on a client’s caseload days or weeks later?
Audit Your Hours
During the process of creating a standard billing practice for your firm, it can also be helpful to do an internal audit of how your lawyers are using their time. Are senior members spending more time doing non-billable work than they are billing clients? Yikes! Identify those tasks that are pulling attorneys away from billable work and see if it can either be automated or shifted to an admin. When you really dial into how you are spending your days, you might be shocked at what you discover.
Automate Repetitive Processes
As you analyze your time-tracking process and implement a standard procedure, consider what can be automated. Maybe it’s invoicing or billing. Consider those repetitive tasks that are a resource drain in your firm and start there with automation.
If you need help, our team at Honeycrisp is standing by. Let us help you identify problem areas so you can implement effective tech solutions. Contact us today to ask your questions about Apple technology and learn ways to best leverage your tech tools.
