Tip 4-Track Time Concurrently
Dustin Cole, president of Attorneys Master Class, says: “Attorneys fail to bill from 10 to 25 percent of their legitimate billable hours due to bad recording habits, overwhelm and disorganization, and poor team management.”1
So by not maximizing your personal productivity and accurately tracking your time, you are under billing for actual work done by 10?25%. If you are an attorney generating $400,000 in annual billings, this is costing you or your firm $100,000 in lost revenues.
Cole says that it’s virtually impossible to reconstruct work done more than a day ago-estimating that waiting a week to reconcile your time can cause you to lose as much as 15?25% of it.
Attendees at a recent educational webinar about attorney time capture, which was sponsored by Chrometa, attendees cited constant interruptions and the need to multi?task as the top two factors that cause them to lose the most billable time. For folks who agree, we hope tips 2 and 3 in this paper will help you out.
Close behind was “waiting too long to reconcile time.” Chrometa’s survey of new users in June 2009 revealed that many attorneys reconcile their time every few days or longer-with some only doing this torturous task monthly. As a result, significant time is being lost.
So as painful as it may be, the data shows clearly that the more frequently
you can update your billable time, the less of it you’ll lose.
Contributed by:
Dan Markovitz and Brett Owens
http://www.markovitzconsulting.com/
1 Source: Dustin A. Cole: Billing Profitably and Ethically. Read the full paper at:
http://chrometa.com/downloads/Billing_Profitably_and_Ethically.pdf
