For lawyers who bill by the hour keeping detailed and accurate time records is absolutely essential to maximizing income. Unfortunately, most lawyers tend to estimate their time nearly always resulting in shortchanging themselves.

Try out this system for a week and see if you do not dramatically increase your billed hours: keep detailed notes of the start and end time on every single piece of work that you do so that you know exactly what the total time expended was on each billeable item, even really small ones.

You can do this by hand effectively if you keep a note pad handy for only this purpose and no other. Personally, I like to automate it with software. Most billing software has this function built into it, although I’ve never used mine (I use Timeslips) for this purpose.

Instead I use couple of different pieces of free software. On my computer I use a very simple program called Freewatch. It is a very simple desktop timer. If you’re interested you can download it here:

For my Palm (it is important that you’re able to track time out of the office as well), I using other free and very simple program called big clock. You can download it here:

Try this out and I bet you will increase your billable time by at least 25%. Whatever your results, I’d like to hear about them so please comment below.

Posted on July 22nd, 2008 by Scott
Filed under: Time Records