How DuLaw Simplifies Lawfirm Time Tracking
- By DuLaw
To many Lafirms, time tracking is one of the challenging tasks in their daily operations, when it comes to tracking how much time each lawyer has spent on a specific task it becomes a complicated and hard to do topic.
But We all know, all law firms charge by their time and knowledge they invest in clients' projects, so, in easy language we can say time is literally money—so it’s vital to find a method of tracking time that works for you and your firm. Even if your billing structure is not hourly (i.e., charging flat fees or on a contingency basis), knowing where each lawyer spends more time is important, bottom-line, the best means to ensure the profitability of your work.
Time tracking is not an easy job. So many law firms opt to ignore and use different approaches for billing, most of them use flat fees to avoid time tracking challenges . It’s painful and very time consuming with so many possibilities of errors for the lawyer and any staff member who needs to hunt this information down when billing clients each time.
What you really need to know is, if you put too long a time gap for time tracking, e.g. every month or every six months, then you will also need a lot of time to go through all of your records to track what was done and time spent on each task. And this is only possible if you are very good at documenting the work you did for each client.
Most law firms and lawyers are still tracking their time manually using diaries (pen and paper), not only is it stressful to think about whether you accurately tracked that time, it’s also stressful to worry about losing track of that timesheet before it actually makes it to a bill. Not to mention the redundancy of having to rewrite those entries into excel or non legal management System billing platforms each month. This is the struggle which most lawyers have been passing through on time tracking, yes it's very hard.
Is lawyer time tracking really matter?
Given the busy schedule lawyers face, many lawyers face challenges in identifying minor tasks which take much of their time, actitime identified that "that ideIdentify time wasters. Most management problems come from spending too much time on things that don’t bring you results and move you forward. Make sure to invest your time into meaningful tasks and projects". By automating and simplifying lawyer time tracking using a legal management system which is tailor made for that, law firms can save time, improve work efficiency and billing accuracy, and increase productivity by revealing day-to-day inefficiencies in their processes.
For many law firms, utilization rate (i.e., the number of hours billed divided by the number of hours worked) is very low, most of the law firms in Tanzania which we have interviewed with, have admitted that they do not use any tool to track time. Most of them are not sure if they billcorrecly and think maybe they are under utilizing their revenue collection. Very few billable hours are invoiced. Also, it's hard to know how much time they spend in non-billable hours. The conclusion is that all law firms need to use a good systematic approach with the right tools which will streamline lawyer time tracking tasks to identify lost revenue opportunities, increase work efficiencies, and increase the bottom line.
How can you improve your time tracking with Dulaw Worklog
One of the best ways which Dulaw will ensure you’re capturing the most time possible for all your billable tasks is to record every task you have been working on. This eliminates the possibility that any work will get lost or forgotten later on. In Dulaw staff worklog and timesheet is available under the Worklog menu. This enables lawyers to create a daily worklog for every specific task. At Managerial level, you will be able to view all worklogs for every lawyer and time they spend, also how much revenue they have contributed to the firm.
System will auto calculate the work effort for every time you spend working on a client task. The cost amount is derived from each lawyer hourly rate which will eventually help you to bill based on the quality and experience of the lawyer. The most experienced lawyer will be expensive compared to a fresh one.
Revenue tracking and generation for every hour
Dulaw is a cloud based law firm management system which automates law firms business processes, revenue management is one of them. Once a lawyer has created an invoice, your staff with the right role can create an invoice based on the worklog. Invoice will contain amount and task done. Also, you will be able to monitor Invoice status for each worklog.
The linkage between worklog and Invoice is a sure deal in making sure nothing goes unnoticed, our strong Invoice system is coming with status and notification reminders. Everytime a new invoice is created your client will be notified and get reminded for Invoice settlement.
Automate Timesheet generation from worklog entries
We all know, sometimes clients need proof of work done, they want to know each time spent by a lawyer if it tally with their work schedule and outputs. The Dulaw timesheet is a Swiss knife for this. With few filters, you can generate each client timesheet in pdf with all details you need.
Below is a timesheet pdf sample generated on Dulaw which contains all useful information and some copyright information which is another way to increase trust with your clients.
We all agree that there's no doubt tracking time is important for any serious law firm. Dulaw makes lawyer time tracking as friendly and efficient as possible to ensure you have the right tools in place while spending more time doing core business activities. This will also help ensure you’re able to keep track of every lawyer minute of billable work, so nothing gets lost.
DuLaw also comes with several other options for tracking, invoicing, billing and managing your time accurately and efficiently. Once every minute for a Lawyer is captured in a centralized time sheet (as we have seen in Dulaw lawyer timesheets) for each client at the firm you will increase transparency with your clients. Also by tracking every worklog you’ll be able to quickly generate all of your invoices for every task or as a collection of tasks. DuLaw also allows you to keep record of your non-billable time can also help improve revenue and collections at your Law firm.
See it in action