Many lawyers aren’t tracking their time like they should. It’s all too common to scribble your time out on a Post-It note, or enter it into a spreadsheet. Sometimes you guess how long a task took. Even worse, you do some work and don’t even account for it at all.
How much time are you forgetting, or miss-calculating? How much money are you leaving on the table? We were curious, and so we asked. And what we found was surprising.
Comparing similar matters before and after implementing a time tracking strategy, lawyers billed up to 35% more time when using a timer like the one built into TimeNet Law.
It turns out, humans aren’t very good at estimating time. And we’re not overestimating. We’re coming up short. Psychologists have coined terms and written books on the phenomena (for example, “the planning fallacy” and “optimism bias.”)
Contractors often miss project completion dates by weeks. A common rule for programmers and video editors is to estimate how long a project will take, and then double it.
That task you did that felt like 45 minutes could easily have been 2 hours. Maybe it took you “10 minutes” to read a document, but a timer would tell you 24 minutes. Those things all add up to significant increases.
By not logging and timing your tasks as you go, you could be losing thousands of dollars in potential revenue for your law firm every single month!
Time tracking isn’t particularly glamorous. It can be tedious or seem unnecessary. But it is absolutely critical that you start building good time tracking habits today. By using time tracking software and recording your time and tasks, as you do them, you will increase your billable hours. We guarantee it. And while time tracking itself may not be particularly exciting, it’s fun to see the money ticking up.