Contents
The stopwatch is a tried and true means to track time. Most modern legal software systems provide this time-tracking feature. For example, if a lawyer opens a case file, there’s usually a digital stopwatch they can click to begin tracking the time spent on a task.
Why do lawyers bill in six-minute increments? Billing six minutes at a time is standard practice for practical reasons: Manually billing by the minute or in smaller increments is difficult and time-consuming to track and calculate by hand.
Non-billable hours refers to the time you spend at work engaged in non-money making activities. … When you spend time on activities that don’t directly make money, you still need to get compensated for your time. Remember, Everyone else gets paid to work!
If you are providing only one service, you must get to 23 minutes before you bill for the second unit. For example, if you performed 9 minutes of therapeutic activities and 10 minutes of manual therapy, you would bill one unit each, even though the total is 19 minutes.
What are billable hours? Billable hours are quite simple; these are the ones you charge your clients for work directly done on their projects; for example, the hours of a developer working on a new webpage, administrative work, or other project activities.
Fifteen minutes (1/4th of an hour) – Under this structure, lawyers bill tasks in 15-minute increments. Tasks that take less time are rounded up to 15 minutes for billing purposes. This billing increment tends to garner the most push back from clients who don’t appreciate being billed 15 minutes for a 5-minute task.
Minutes | Time |
---|---|
37-42 | .7 |
43-48 | .8 |
49-54 | .9 |
55-60 | 1.0 |
Your lawyer can charge you for a range of legal work that they do for you, including: phone calls or emails they make or receive about your case. the time they spend drafting documents for your matter. the time they spend reviewing your case and preparing for court.
To track non-billable time on projects:
On the Project Schedule or Worklist, create a phase called Non-billable. It should span the duration of the project. Click on the phase name on the project Worklist, then select Edit Phase Settings. On the Phase Settings page, choose Set different bill rates for this phase.
Over the long run, the expectation is that you should be averaging 40 billable hours a week – assuming you have productive work to do. If you don’t have client work to do, escalate to your manager or to an engagement manager for any projects you’re on.
Time for work spent performing a service should be reported in tenths of an hour. Compensation is calculated by multiplying the applicable rate per hour by the total number of hours.
The easiest way to calculate in tenth of an hour increments is to divide the number of minutes by 60 and then round to the nearest tenth of an hour.
MINUTES | TENTHS |
---|---|
52 | .9 |
53 | .9 |
54 | .9 |
55 | .9 |
We can define billable work as the hours pertaining to the work directly related to the client’s projects. … Whereas non-billable work is time spent on tasks that you cannot directly bill to clients. Freshbooks.com has a complete list of examples on non-billable tasks: Developing proposals for new work.
Depending on how you set up your fees and contracts, you might designate time spent invoicing as administrative work — the cost of doing business. Or you might consider invoicing part of client and project management — and bill for it. … If you put it under project management, your project fees will be higher.
How many billable hours is normal? It’s not a complicated equation – the more hours you bill, the more revenue for the firm. Firms “average,” “target” or “minimum” stated billables typically range between 1700 and 2300, although informal networks often quote much higher numbers.
Needless to say, “buyer beware.” A “Minute” is used to define a billable measure of time. Usually, this time covers any time a live telephone answering operator is working on your calls. The number of minutes you are billed for depend on how long an operator is on the phone with your caller.
You can’t bill for documentation. Documentation takes time—there’s no denying that. Even if you have an EMR system that streamlines the process, there’s still a lot of effort that goes into creating notes that are complete, correct, and compliant.
A tenth of an hour represents 10% of an hour which is equal to 6 minutes.
For example, if an employee worked one hour and 20 minutes, you would type 1.333 in the Duration (Hours) field. The following chart shows how minutes are converted to a fraction of an hour by dividing the number of minutes by 60.
Minutes | Decimal Hours |
---|---|
57 | .95 |
58 | .97 |
59 | .98 |
60 | 1.0 |
Well, Attorneys charge for phone calls. When you pay your legal account you aren’t just paying the Attorney’s hourly fee, as there is a lot more that goes into solving your case than can be encompassed in an hourly fee. … As stated above, Telephone Calls are billed.
Cash is acceptable as a form of payment to an attorney.
Lawyers should keep a few things in mind about other lawyers’ schedules. … Of course, lawyers are usually far more responsive to emails and phone calls they receive when they are most likely to be at the grind handling legal matters, but counterparts often email or call outside these time periods.
Using the internal job to record non-billable time
The idea is to have the one internal time job set up where any time not being billed to a client can be accounted for. You can then report per week or month (or any other period) for time entries against the tasks on that job, or by staff member, or as required.
The billable hour is a critical part of most law firms’ ability to do business. It’s important that law firms devise effective strategies for getting the most out of their billable hours while helping lawyers and clients understand just how law firms bill.
Non-billable hours represent everything you do at work that can’t be billed or expensed to a client. They can be costs swallowed by your business that enable it to function and continue, as well as project-specific expenses. Common examples of non-billable time include: Bids, proposals and pitches for new business.