Have you been in a situation where you have been busy handling work for a client, only to realise that you have no idea when you started the task and how long you‘ve already spent on it?
If you do use a timer to track billable hours, have you ever received an important email and dropped everything to take action on it, only to realise that you are still timing the work for a different client?
Tracking billable hours can be a source of frustration, and it is worth understanding the negative impact it has on your firm and your clients when time slips away from you.
How important is accurate time tracking when determining billable hours?
Your client expects fairness and accuracy in their bills, and the only way to determine the billable hours worked is to have tracked them effectively.
Our research discovered that a third of firms delay invoices due to timesheets not being completed.
Larger firms tended to be more impacted by this, which is a worrying prospect if you are a smaller firm looking to grow.
In addition to this, we found that 50 per cent of lawyers billed between five and eight hours a day but only ten per cent exceeded nine to ten hours.
Either law firms are having longer lunches than we realised, or something is going wrong with billable hours somewhere.
We know that you work more than you are billing, which raises the question:
“How much work do you do for free?”
What causes billable hours to be missed?
Inefficient approaches to tracking time can cause billable hours to be missed entirely.
While it might not seem like a problem when a minute or two are improperly tracked here or there, these minutes soon add up and hours and days get lost without payment.
When you factor in the effort taken to onboard clients, much of which will not count as billable work, this can result in missing out on vital revenue.
The overfocus on low-value work can also impact billable hours.
How much can you really charge a client for constructing their legal documents or for reading through email chains to remind yourself of what has been said in the conversation so far?
All of these inefficiencies cause a loss of revenue, but they also impact your well-being.
It is stressful to know that your hard work is not being rewarded.
No one wants to feel as though they are working in vain, yet low-value work can hold up your workflow and stop you from getting to the more fulfilling parts of the job.
We want solicitors to be happier with the work they do.
That’s why Smokeball uses automated time tracking to ensure that billable hours never get missed again.
This dynamic system automatically keeps a separate log for each client’s work, meaning you can multitask like the legal legend you are and not have to worry about which timer is tracking which client.
Our AI, Archie, also takes away the low-value work that holds you back by creating bespoke legal documents and providing accurate summaries of email chains for any of your team to read.
No longer do your billable hours need to suffer when one of the team is away, as anyone can jump straight in and be fully up to date.
Smokeball automatically generates invoices that reflect the time spent on each client’s work, meaning no more delays in sending those invoices out and, importantly, getting paid for your work.
Our dashboard gives you insights into where your time is spent, so you can optimise your workflow and plan more effectively.
Never miss a billable hour again. Book a demo today!
