As a lawyer, you need to be accurate with tracking the amount of time that you spend on your clients. After all, a lot of attorneys still bill by the billable hour, and if you don’t keep track of your billable time, you won’t be paid for it. Due to the effects of COVID-19, financial flow is less predictable now that we are in the middle of a pandemic, making this issue even more crucial.
What is legal time tracking?
Prior to the pandemic, utilizing a pen and paper timesheet to log time may sometimes be sufficient, but not anymore. Since many businesses either entirely or partly employ remote workers, a dated time-tracking system is ineffective when team members are dispersed across multiple locations.
In addition to being unproductive, trying to jury-rig a paper-based system to record billable time wastes time that might be better used on billable tasks. Whether you like it or not, the best course of action is to update to a more streamlined and centralized cloud-based time-tracking system if your company wants to make sure that all time is recorded and billed—even when workers are working remotely.
The good news is that a lot of cloud-based time-tracking software tools have been in use for close to ten years and have undergone extensive testing. There are a variety of choices available depending on your firm’s requirements, ranging from stand-alone time-tracking software to powerful legal billing or practice management programs with integrated time-tracking capabilities.
The importance of legal time tracking
Whichever method you choose, the attorneys in your firm will be able to log their time using a computer or mobile device from anywhere. This will enable time to be recorded and entered contemporaneously, ensuring that your business records all of its billable time and charging for it.
Only cloud-based time tracking tools will be discussed in this article; earlier columns this year covered cloud-based legal billing and payment processing tools. Also, important to note is that you have an ethical duty to properly investigate the technology provider that will be hosting and keeping your data anytime you submit the data of your law company to a third party, such as when you utilize cloud-based time-tracking software.
This entails, among other things, making sure that you comprehend how the data will be handled by that business and where the servers where the data will be kept are situated. It also requires knowing who will have access to the data and how and when it will be backed up. Here are some of the most prominent time-tracking software programs to take into consideration in light of this.
Most often because prospective customers believe it is a simpler feature for developers to provide and see it as a necessary component that can never be compromised, the significance of a useful legal time tracking software is undervalued. A solid time monitoring system can help you save countless hours. A poor one might cost you more hours than you can think, depending on how long it runs before you catch it.
Using Matterly for legal time tracking software
The legal time tracking software Matterly is completely automated. This means that everything, including matter input and billing, may be completed almost automatically. Every law practice will need some kind of legal automation in 2022 in order to compete.
Legal time tracking is one of the most beneficial features that come along with Matterly. You can use it to assign billing hour rates to the team members and then figure out the total billable amount that you are going to charge from the clients. Start using Matterly and you will surely fall in love with its features.
