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1. Bill for every single thing you do. 2. At the end of the day, go through your emails to capture any missed time.
Including sent emails.
Do you need to *bill* 7 hours or *record* 7 hours? Ie if you don’t have enough client work, can you record time for reviewing legal news and recent cases?
Another tip is to make sure to email your team offering help and saying you have capacity. Then if you are called out on not billing enough, you can point to your emails offering help.
As a paralegal it’s not your job to generate work. If the senior team is not bringing in work, that’s on them. As long as you get all assigned work done well and on time and record the time you spent doing it, that’s all that can reasonably be expected of you.
I need to record 7 hours, not bill it. The issue truly is learning the skill of tracking my time accurately and well.
You need to train yourself to track your time. No excuses about getting busy and forgetting. If you want to be in private practice you'll need to figure this out. Surely you're not doing 5 hours of .2s - block bill your time for clients if your can, and when you switch clients you need to stop, take a breath, change your timer, and move on. At the end of the day if you have 5 hours and you know you actually billed 7, go to each of your matters and make sure to didn't short change yourself. You can't wait a week to do that, it has to be every day. Don't screw yourself over because of bad time keeping habits.
If it’s not documented it didn’t happen.
What can I do to improve my timekeeping? I already use timers. The nature of my role here is that I don't spend significant amounts of time on any specific matter - instead it's lots of .2 and .3s. So very easy to forget to switch timers or just miss something entirely.
I work 8 hours and on average am capturing about 5. They want me at 6.8 or more. This feels impossible. The position doesn't necessitate OT and we aren't so insanely busy that I can't see straight or anything. It's a manageable load.
I'm telling you, it's a good gig save for this timekeeping issue.
If you’re only working 8 hours a day and routinely missing your target, work more. Some late nights and a little pain will make you more efficient to prevent the same in the future. I can’t imagine my HR file getting written up and then deciding to clock out and 5 when my billing is still under, especially if it’s somewhere I wish to remain employed.
OP, is your time being charged to clients? If so, you need to record your time so the clients can pay for it. If not, it's getting accounted for somewhere so that the partner knows how to set their own rates for client matters. It's part of the business model - don't see it as just them putting a burden on you, but it's about tracking your value.
You're likely shorting yourself with the timers. A lot of them round down to 0.1 for 8 minutes, etc. when you should always round up. Switch to a notepad where each day you record time by hand in a shorthand you can understand and then enter en masse at the end of the day or next morning. Wear a watch or a fitness tracker with a time display so you can get in the habit of checking the time for interactions that may take place away from your desk/notepad. Make note in your notes of the time billable calls/meetings start and end (I do this in the margins). Do you have some non-billable codes too, like for administrative things? Make sure you include that stuff too so you can get a sense of where your time is going. Example of some notepad entries (treat each discrete task as 0.1 unless they add up per client in a way that doesn't seem reasonable, like reading a one-line email and responding "received" or "thanks!" probably should not be a 0.2 in my opinion):
.1 review email from (client's name)
.2 discuss ^ w (atty initials)
Organize discovery in (case): 9:54-11:47
-.2 respond to email from (different client)
-.1 (blank if you went to the bathroom or got legitimately distracted)
.6 call with (client)
I’ve been practicing for 30 years. Time entry is a skill like any other. My practice is to bill for bulk things I do as they occur, and then bill for all the email at the end of the day. It’s a complete drag to live your life in 6 minute increments, but it is the reality of the practice. You just need to find what works for you.
We used to hand write them, and then they were inputted by clerks or assistants. I’m not suggesting going back to that, but maybe a running log on a legal pad will work better for you.
I know someone who has the time entry app open on his iPad all day so he can work with timers and documents without switching to the time entry app on his screen.
You being the only one who is getting emails about it is a whole different issue. First off, make sure that’s true. If you’re being singled out, it may be time to look elsewhere, because that just seems like they’re setting you up to get fired for cause.