Calling all solicitors! (Or others who have timesheets at work) How did you get better at time recording?

[Lingles]

I’m a partner now in my firm and really enjoy it apart from having to support solicitors to record their time efficiently to meet the firms targets.

our specialism is seen as one for quirky people who are fascinated by the subject matter, rather than money. I fall into that category myself but have “found my way” through years of experience. My bosses are not like that. They have never struggled, so have no understanding or sympathy for someone who does not complete their timesheet daily giving a full account of the day.

two of my solicitors confess to being really efficient only in emergencies. When there isn’t an emergency they will tend to:
1 “store up” work
2 go down rabbit holes of intellectually satisfying things that grab their attention
3 get too interested in the topic at hand and forget to record their time
4 get distracted
5 start a job well but then get stuck and let it fester whilst newer shinier tasks take their attention.

HR would support me in asking for external productivity training if anyone can recommend something. But I would be grateful for any thoughts at all really.

That’s super helpful lulu.
we have a very plain spoken culture so your approach would work I think.
but backed with personality type stuff would be better still :)

The carrot in most law firms is a chargeable hours target and bonus. Some firms require meeting the hours target to be eligible for promotion. I don't necessarily agree with this as people can't always control the available amount if work but it's a possible carrot if you are looking for one (particularly the bonus).

If the problem is under-recording, you should look at how much are they penalised for write-offs. This can lead to self-censoring.

If the issue is unnecessary research: could you get a PSL (even part-time) and insist that research requests go to them, and log all of them so you can analyse what knowledge gaps there are? A good PSL might be able to cut short some of the faffing.

Time blocking, colour coding and alarms 😂 also rewarding myself once each task was complete 😂

<buys book>

Yeah for me the personality stuff comes into how I broach the system with them, not amending the system to fit their quirks (they probably chose the wrong line of work for that!). So people who benefit from more of a handhold or confidence boost I'm all about "you're doing such amazing work, your clients love you, I'm so lucky to have you in my team, I want you to get the credit for all your hard work....". For other people it'll be "if you bill over target you'll get a bonus; on you go". Horses for courses, but, however framed, the message surely is that time recording's the bedrock of a successful legal practice, it's here to stay and they need to get to grips with it.

Great thread though! Can we have SolicitorNet for niche chat like this?!

This^ 1000% my old workplace did away with timesheets eventually and honestly I feel people worked harder in recognition of the trust the employer had in them because they didn't want to lose that trust. I've never worked in one since that required them. The work always shows for itself.

Law firms differ in their approaches, but many (most?) will have a system where you record your time and that directly equates to the bill a client gets sent. So under time recording results in lower bills and means a firm is less profitable. The smaller the firm, or the tighter the margins on the work in question, the more significant a problem that will be.

Put the rates for clients up?

I was always useless at it but survived 20 years in private practice before going in house (I now have intellectual rabbit holes that are actually relevant to my company which is great!)

Rather than being motivated by a big stick I used to focus on the reasons I'd benefit from getting better, even if that is that people would get off my back or would have a better understanding of what I did. However, I did get quite good at knowing what level of underreporting I could get away with under different managers and rarely had the incentive to exceed that!

I've always found the actual time recording simple and was asked by a supervisor to give tips. I found it simple as all firms I've worked at have timers built into the case management system. Every time I start a new piece of work/client calls I open up the case and start the timer. Phone calls in particular are much more accurately recorded and those odd minutes eventually add up. The timer can be overridden if I have procrastinated etc.

I suppose the problem for you is getting your staff to actually do this. I think weekly time sheet submissions would focus them.

This may work for you

It's a app that I use to log hours at different sites that I work at.

There is a paid for ( one off £4 payment ) version where you can export the info but i use the free one.
It is intuitive to use , .
To start with you set your ( or clients) ROP and set up the calander to your liking .
To set start hours tap the time , click OK then at the end of the project tap the time again to put in your finish time ( it's set automatically to the actual time you are putting the info in )
You can add notes like clients name , location, .put in holiday pay and other info.
You can set as many start/ stop times a day as you want.

It can be altered and updated at any time., it does not need to be done in in real tmie I often wait until lunch break and then go back and put the information in or wait until the end of the day and then put all the information in

I use this daily then put all the info on to my weekly time sheet at the end of the week.

We had an overhead category we charged all staff meetings, admin, professional development (inc. rabbit holes that are job related). The accountant then calculated that into a % of direct time as a charge added to the client’s bill. They’d do an annual calculation and set that as a set % overhead charge for the next year.

The direct time, I would just set a timer when I started and stop it when finished or interrupted. Then log that increment on a sheet. End of day, I’d add up the increments and log direct time spent per client. The end of day time doing this went against overhead.

This is a screen shot of one shift , when you put more shifts in you can view the whole week / month.
I realise you were still relying on people to put the information in which they don't seem to be doing for you but at least this one can be done later so they will remember what they did when and where and for whom

Doesn't the calendar in your emails system allow for time to be allocated per client? I used to use this all the time, mainly because I didn't want to be given more work to do and brought into team meetings that I didn't want to attend so my week would be booked up and I'd adjust the previous session for what I did do, of the different projects and of the different stages of each project to reflect the last 2 hours work.

When I used to be in the legal profession, I had a colleague who was let go because they couldn't /wouldn't time record.
The issue was that they spent time doing stuff they they thought shouldn't be billable.. this involved various phone calls and research, but on the client's behalf. They couldn't grasp that the firm needed to know how much time was actually spent, not how much time the fee earner thought they should have spent. We were trying to work out what to charge for conveyancing at the time, and to get an idea of how many fee earning hours the average transaction took. The fee earner didn't want to record time that was spent doing anything other than actual procuring of documents... if it took 20 minutes to make a phone call, they would only charge for 5, because some of the call was just chatting; if it took an hour to read and consider documents, they didn't feel able to charge for the thinking time.
I suspect the fee earners you are dealing with know that in fact they are not being very productive, or they are unable to work flat out for 8/10 hours without stopping. Thinking time is really important as a lawyer, but it's hard to define when proper consideration of papers becomes something vaguer.
I would suggest have someone actually sitting with them for a few days and recording everything they do, so that they get a picture of how a day should look. Presumably you have clarified that not every minute can be chargeable, and have given an indication of how many chargeable hours they are expected to do a day? Is there time for research built in and a policy for dealing with that - eg recordable but not chargeable to a particular client? Keeping up with new developments is vital, and it needs to be clear how that appears on the time recording sheets.

Some accountancy firms have software which records everything done on the computer as you do it on time reporting system. It is then used to complete a timesheet. It records tasks that take as a little as a minute.

I am not a lawyer but have a job with a lot of thinking time and tangents. I can really get lost sometimes. I find when the solution/ aids to my timekeeping is also the same source of my work load - ie a phone or a computer it makes it harder to manage.

I like to have physical things which make me come back to ‘reality’ rather than lost in a pile of screen / windows and are softer than a blaring alarm which stress me out.

So I have two sand timers which I keep on my desk. One half hour, one 15 minutes. I use these to challenge myself to do a certain thing before the sand runs out - useful for days of lots of tiny things. And I also use them if working on a big project all day and I recognise I am about to go down or am stuck in a tangent. 15/30 only to explore this further.

I also like to have dedicated time keeping stationary. So either day written out in hours and you can scribble on your blocks as you go. Or as I don’t have to timesheet myself my current favourite is desktop kaban style to do lists.

It’s materialistic in a way but it really helps me stay in the here and now, and allows me opportunity to come away from the computer and reset for a minute multiple times a day. And time keeping/ pressure / productivity becomes some nice tangible thing you can touch in real life rather than something intangible you are chasing and trying to catch your tail.

Weird but it works for me.

My current favourites:
Desktop Todo Kaban Style Blocks -
design-milk.com/increase-your-productivity-conquer-your-to-do-list-with-analog/
15 minute timer -
www.dunelm.com/product/sand-timer-17cm-black-1000183941?defaultSkuId=30712771
30 minute timer -
www.dunelm.com/product/elements-sculpted-green-sand-timer-1000200037?defaultSkuId=30764869

Wow, lots to read!

Solicitor here. We work off a programme (have an IT-obsessed Equity partner) which means any time you make an action in a file there is an automatic popup that asks 'time record' and you click and it starts an auto time recording. So if you start a letter using the programme template it automatically time records it. You can click 'no' for time recording if you are just looking at something or doing pro bono work but you cannot actually start anything at all without the popup asking you to make the decision on it.

Wow Lobelia. I expect that will be normal soon!

It's a brilliant cae management system. Not sure at all what it is called but you can schedule deadlines in it etc and it just sorts it all for you.

Personally I dislike time recording. I work in child protection which is mostly legally aided but also in private client and I usually want to take my time over things so I know the client is being properly represented. I hate 6 minute units with a passion.

I use outlook and block out my diary with what I'm doing for the day/week and keep that up to date. I then time record using that, usually on a Friday afternoon- that's the bit that takes the discipline so I commit to share it every week so I have to do it. For some reason I find that easiest and most reliable for me- otherwise I just end up with lots of timers running, or nothing at all. I now work in house and I do scrutinise bills and narrative from external law firms very closely and although wouldn't complain if I thought I was under-charged, would probably be able to spot an associate who was poor at time recording!

Not very glamorous but I found it is just something you need to make a habit of and stick to it, eg sorting out timesheets before you leave the office. I'm not terribly organised so it wasn't something that came naturally to me but my firm were pretty strict about it, and I think once you realise you will get pulled up if you aren't doing it promptly you just start getting on with it and doing it. I forget the actual stat, but apparently if you don't record your time on the day then you tend to lose a very significant proportion of your time, due to underestimating what you spent on something or just forgetting all the 5 minute jobs you did. From the firms perspective that adds up massively and its something my firm were always harping on about.

I could also have quite happily sat reading cases and research but I think you just need to appreciate thats not actually your job, beyond what's professionally necessary to keep up with developments (which though necessary obviously isn't chargeable). It sounds a bit like your team need to remember they're being paid to do a job, not fulfil their interests, tempting and understandable as that can be. From their perspective also worth remembering that it doesn't really help with a work life balance if you're adding to your day by spending a lot of time doing stuff that doesn't actually need done.

Do they have enough work to do? I think most people in my team would liked to have sit reading but the main thing stopping everyone was the pressure of trying to get all the work done, there just wasn't time to go down intellectual rabbit holes not necessary to the work!

Could also be worth thinking about if there's any more acceptable research things they could do to scratch that itch - I used to do a lot of business development with industry groups on developing areas of the law which was useful to the firm and also gave me an excuse to do some reading around. Still had the difficulty of fitting it all in with the required amount of chargeable work though!

A good PA. Mine would shadow me throughout the day and spend the last 10 minutes of their day every day completing them.

I only had to remember my thinking time when drifting off to sleep, in the shower or when brushing my teeth.