I hope the link to this song works. If not, google “I’m Billing Time” by The Bar and Grill Singers. The song speaks to the heart of every lawyer. Sometimes I would even send it to my clients when they would complain about legal fees.
The reality is that most lawyers have a hard time capturing and recording their time. In fact, it is so common a problem that lawyers actually talk about it all the time. Training associates to capture and bill time appropriately was something that I supervised closely. Now that I work directly with more experienced attorneys, I have noticed that the lack of training they received earlier in their career makes it is even more difficult for them to do this now.
With an abundance of techie gadgets and programs available to attorneys, one would think that this problem would resolve itself. The problem is not the software – the problem is very human.
When people ask me how long it takes me to complete a particular project or task, I can tell them with a good degree of certainty. For example, I write a lot of blogs. When I first started doing it, a blog might take me 2-2.5 hours from the time I conceived of an idea, gathered some research, sketched out a draft, put it aside, came back to it for edits, and gave it a final review. Now I can do a blog in 1-1.5 hours (depending on my familiarity with the topic). I know this because I tracked my time (I still track my time). Even for this blog, which is being written for my own website, I spent about 20 minutes researching sources for habit formation (which I will discuss below). The rest of this, is just me being me.
How can you learn to capture your time? I some suggestions. All of these methods have the same common theme: habit formation. Habit formation is the process by which behaviors become automatic. Sometimes habits form without any intention. You drive the exact same way to work every day. That’s a habit. Habits can form when you take actions to deliberately cultivate them. If you have a particular goal – like capturing all of your billable time – you can create that habit. Presto! Easy Peasy! Right?
According to a 2009 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, it takes 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit. The article is here:
The study also concluded that, on average, it takes 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic. No doubt you have heard before that it takes about 3 weeks to form a habit. In considering my suggestions, you will see this habit-forming thing as a theme. Nothing will work unless you work it. You have to put in the time to get the results.
Here are my suggestions.
- Write down everything that you do all day for 3-4 weeks. If you think I’m kidding about everything I’m not. If you go potty – write it down. If you spend 15 minutes bullshitting with your secretary in the morning – write it down. If you are stuck in traffic and it takes 45 minutes to get to work and not 30 minutes – WRITE IT DOWN. Write down what work you do for every client, whether you are doing flat fee work or not. If you have a staff meeting, partner meeting, etc. – are you getting it – WRITE IT DOWN!
When I say write it down, I mean it. Write it on a note pad or printed piece of paper. If you just type it into the computer that isn’t going to really accomplish the learning process. We are all ‘billing’ into some kind of software program. Your problem is capturing all of your time. The first step is to take a step back and go old school.
At the end of each day set aside 15 minutes to go through what you have done and enter your billable time into your billing software. This accomplishes two goals. First, you can evaluate your day and see where you have wasted or lost time. The second, is it forces you to actually enter your time each day. However, if you can’t enter the time into your software, you already have it captured on your note pad and can do it the next day. The biggest loss of billable time for lawyers is simply forgetting what you did and how long you spent. And believe me, the .2’s add up!
- Get a Billing Buddy. When I first started in practice, I worked with two older gentlemen who hand wrote their time onto timeslips. Those slips were then given to our ‘billing paralegal’ who entered the time into the dinosaur like box of a computer. Each month they had a contest to see who billed more time. After I about a year I won… pretty much every month until I left the firm years later. Why was this key to my success in learning to bill? I had accountability. It was never about billing more hours. It was about being accountable to each other.
In my experience solo attorneys, or attorneys in small firms where you live tantamount to a solo, have no accountability for meeting billable goals. If you have a practice that runs on billable hours (as opposed to flat fees) it is harder to budget and frankly, it is harder to determine how much work you have to do and how much more you can take on. But we don’t see it that way because our focus is on paying the bills this month.
Having someone who is holding you accountable helps. And, you need to accept the fact that your billing buddy is going to need to yell at you or scold you if you don’t meet your billable goals. This can be another attorney in the office, or it can be your staff person. But having someone that you have to report your time to (daily, weekly, or monthly) will push you to meet your goals.
You need to authorize this person to command you to turn over your daily time logs before they leave the office. And, you have to comply. But most importantly, you need to make sure that you are both doing this every single day and holding each other accountable to have a daily check in, until you have both formed the habit. You don’t have to do it the same way that I have described, but the concept of having a partner to help you bill is what you need to focus on.
- Keep a running tally and budget time. Yeah… on a notepad. Yeah… every single day. One of the best lessons my bestie teaches other lawyers is about budgeting for hours throughout the month. Let me try to explain.
It’s January. Your billable hour goal for the month is 100 hours. You want to only work Monday to Friday (no weekends). You also want to take off on New Year’s Day and MLK Day. Well, in 2025 that gives you 21 days to bill your time or you will need to bill 4.76 hours per day. Every week you to need to re-evaluate your billed hours to determine if you are on task. If by January 15th you have only billed 40 hours, then you have to bill 5.45 hours per day in each of the remaining 11 days.
It seems simple, but the reality is that there are plenty of days where you find yourself being a business person, sick, sucked into something happening in the world, or just dealing with non-billable issues. However, the trick here is that you can’t determine how many more hours you need for the month… if you haven’t billed them!
- Issue bills at least monthly. If you are on a regular schedule to issue bills each month, you force yourself to capture and enter your time in your billing software. I practiced in New Jersey for most of my career. We have a requirement that we need to issue bills in family law cases no less than every 90 days where there was activity in a case. I issued bills monthly. Many firms I know issue bills twice per month. If you don’t issue bills, you don’t get paid and if you don’t record (or bill time), you can’t issue bills. Put yourself on a schedule and follow it. The great incentive here is that if you bill the time and get paid monthly then you immediately see the fruit borne of your labor. If you like to make money (and who doesn’t) this is really a great way to incentivize yourself to be a better biller.
My best advice is to just friggen’ do it. The biggest obstacle to billing is your mindset that you don’t like it, can’t do it, don’t wanna – well cry me a river of reasons. As someone who has accounted for my existence in tenths of an hour for over 20 years, I get it. I look at the timer when I’m on the phone with my daughter and tell her how long we have been on a call. I also hate living this way. But if you have a practice that is driven by the billable hour you just have to find a way to mentally defeat the block.
I also suggest trying one or more of the suggestions above to see what works for you. Learning is not one size fits all. Some of us are visual, some oral, some kinesthetic… you get my point. In the end, the software is not the problem. You are not failing to bill your time because there are too many steps to entering time. You are failing to bill your time because you lack the momentum.
Amy is a recovering trial attorney who works with attorneys and small businesses on practice/business management. If you are looking for individual business coaching please reach out or book time with her directly from the website.
