The legal industry is one of the strongest proponents of hourly time as a measurement of employee productivity. The industry uses hourly time to measure the length of projects and determine what the firm’s resources have been spent towards producing. Billable hours are also for the clients, so that time spent on a project can be tracked and the client’s money justified.
How Tracking Works
Time tracking often works in six minute increments. The traditional time clock is difficult for law firms to use, but not impossible. An employee time clock can still measure the hourly rates of support staff. Time management is an important aspect of the industry, because attorneys need to show what projects were completed for clients.
Best Practices
Time tracking gets complicated with the volume of clients an office manages. Some tricks to help mitigate the stress include the usage of sticky notes and spreadsheets. Add a sticky note to a folder that lists how long the last four projects have taken, and replace as needed. Notepad also uses “.log” which can be useful for recording hours worked each time the timesheet is opened. Automated time keeping software may also record actions based on keystrokes or a desktop monitor that someone can start and stop at will.
Some firms will go as far as leaving time sheets at fax machines and in common areas. There is a simple template you can create for excel, listing your name and the times you start and finish your project. If you measure in decimal points, (where each .1 is equal to six minutes) you can use a simple “Sum” formula in excel to tally the billable hours spent for processing.
Time Clocks
A time machine in the employee lounge can still serve a purpose for legal firms. Paralegals and secretaries still need to record their hours worked for payroll purposes. There are few salaried employees in the legal industry, and firms are careful about monitoring overtime hours worked so that payroll is spent efficiently. Some firms use time clocks for salaried employees as well, as a secondary record of hours spent working on a project for the firm.
Final Thoughts
There is room for disruption in how attorneys keep time for themselves and for their clients. The legal industry will require sophisticated software that can measure exact time spent, and software that automates that process as much as possible. There is also the problem of micro-management, which is only amplified by the usage of time clocks. The smart firms use a combination of time tracking methods to keep employee activity monitored.
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This guest post was brought to you by Allied Time, makers of a biometric time clock designed to record employee hours worked. Allied supplies traditional badge and PIN clocks to track billable hours for businesses of all sizes.