But actually how do you bill your time? (and don’t say contemporaneously)

Say you spend 2 minutes answering an email to a client earlier in the day and then 3 minutes on another email later in the day. Do you bill 0.1 or 0.2? More importantly, how do you keep track of that throughout the day?

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I basically take how many hours I know I worked at the end of the day and do my best good faith estimate of how that’s portioned between cases I worked on. I’m not keeping tight track of every email I send.

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It depends. If I create entries contemporaneously, the first email is 0.1. If 4 hours later, I get another email, then it's another 0.1. On the other hand, if there's 8 rapid fire emails being sent and I read them in succession, then it's just the total time (i.e. not 0.1 x 8). I think both of these accurately capture how time is being spent, but I'm open to hearing otherwise/what others think on this.

If you get 10 emails at once vs one email every hour for ten hours, I think those are very different. The latter pulls your attention away each time and are separate tasks imo.

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I use a timer. In your scenario, my timer would run for five minutes total and I would bill .1.

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Timers.

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How hard is it to just use a timer and input time contemporaneously though, honestly feel like it’s a habit every lawyer needs to ingrain. I’ve had days working on 20 matters and was still able to use a timer and contemporaneously record.

Just need to build the habit. Everything else is a huge time suck.

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Nah I do this. When I stop a timer I have intapp set so that the dialogue box pops up and I write down what I did. Then there is no “I have to do my time” at the end of a week. It’s relatively mindless.

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We can only bill .2 and up, if I send one email, I'll write .2, if I send two emails I'll write .2 lol

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I have a notebook where I literally write “10:15 -
10: 25 - Draft response email re: X matter”

I continue this for the entire day. When I start on another matter, I look at the clock and right the time down with a brief narrative of what I’m doing. When I’m done, I write the time down and do the math for the billable time.

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Intapp also doesn’t need you to type in fancy characters. Just click into the time field and write “207-418” and it auto populates.

Last stop time to now button

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This was my saving grace. My new firm doesn’t use Intapp though :(

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I have an excel spreadsheet. It’s handy, because it auto fills current time if you do Ctrl+Shift+; (semi-colon).
After that I do it like L1. If the emails are at different times and interrupt other client work, then it is a separate minimum .1 billing entry. If it is a quick conversation not interrupting anything else I’m billing, then I combine them.

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Combination of contemporaneous time entries and looking through my email and call records during a hectic day. My calls through Teams have a time stamp so it's easy to bill a .1 for a 3 min call. Emails are .1-.4 depending on the length.

Time is easy for me to keep because our database has file numbers listed next to each attorney's files, so time entry is very easy. I have the file list up on one monitor and time entry on the other. Once you get into the habit you don't notice time entry.

Timer for long tasks, add up emails at the end of the day by matter number and estimate .1s for how many interruptions/length and complexity of the email.

I use intapp and have set up timers for each matter. When I'm working on something relating to a given matter, I click the button for that matter. When I check an email relating to another matter that takes more than a moment to dispose of (I don't want to spend more time tracking my time than actually working, and for tiny deviations, it all balances out in the long run), I click on the button for that other matter. Then I click on the first button again. Then when I turn to the next matter, I click on another button. Then periodically (easiest when I do it a few times a day when I'm actually working on the projects, but sometimes I'm playing catch-up at the end of the week) I go into the system and write up actual billing entries. For most clients, time is billed in .1 units. A few matters are billed in .25 increments. Two emails in the same day would run the same clock. Two emails on different days would run different clocks resulting in separate .1 bills.

I run a timer and bill that exact amount.

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But every day you have the option to buy back your time.

How do you buy back time?

It's simple—by saving and investing.

And you don't need to be uber wealthy to regain control of your time.

Consider this…

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