If you are an associate assisting on a file, you get cc’d on all emails and take time to read them and stay up to date, however you aren’t actually replying to the emails or doing any billable work. But you need to stay in the loop for when you need to eventually draft a document and know the facts. How do you record your time for these emails?

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Thank you for posting this question because I thought it was administrative 👀 luckily I’m still super new so I’ve only missed it for a few weeks.

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In so grateful for this post because I never bill for this. Gonna take a stab at it and see what happens. Thanks for sharing!!

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Same here! I’ve definitely thought about how much time in my day it takes up, but I have always assumed I couldn’t bill for it.

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Billable, always. The partner can write it off.

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“Reviewed emails btwn X and Y re....”

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Billable always. Leave it up to the partner to make changes.

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I do an “attention to correspondence” but my matters tend to have block billing (so I’m saying 6 hours and in that time listing the 200 tasks I did).

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I did transactional work before going in house and most of my clients wouldn’t accept block billing.

“Received and reviewed emails from X regarding Y in preparation for Z; Drafted notes in connection with same.”

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To be clear, at my firm, we are instructed on how to phrase slips for uniformity on bills and are also told to always write in past tense.

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“Correspondence”. I have multiple .1 or .2 hour time entries a day that say just that.

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Nope. But i work in a transactional practice. And i feel like all my work for any given matter just blurs together. There’s a lot of “general deal management tasks; attention to xyz docs; correspondence.” Plus it helps that we dont usually send our client detailed time entries.

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Story of my life- I get cc on everything. 😭😩

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“Review and consider correspondence from x”

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I agree with all that you enter your time spent and the partner can reduce if she thinks it is necessary

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“Reviewing email correspondence regarding X.”

.2

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But remember: pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.

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Reviewed correspondence from x regarding y for the purpose of z

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For an associate, reading emails is billable work.

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Ask the partner for their preference. Partner I worked with routinely removed all but one associate from emails because he didn’t like the perception of the client being billed for the other associates reading emails they didn’t need to respond it. I was always out of the loop and felt unneeded. Perhaps up front communication would have avoided this.

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