4 Billing Habits Every Attorney Should Develop Now By Natalie Rodriguez Law360, New York (April 4, 2016, 3:01 PM ET) -- As law firms increasingly feel pressures from clients to keep costs down, detailed and efficient billing practices are growing increasingly important. So rather than making a mad dash at the end of the month or quarter to get together all of your billing information, you should start getting into some everyday habits that will help make the process less painful for all involved you, your billing coordinator, and your clients. Here are four top routines to start that will help you generate the maximum amount of revenue and the minimum amount of client ire. Track Work in Real Time First and foremost, you should start keeping track of your billable hours as they happen, experts say. Capturing time consistently throughout the day will help capture more billable time than it you try to re-create it later on, said Steven J. Best, a partner with Affinity Consulting Group. Not keeping track as it happens or at the very least at the end of each day means you re more prone to forget that telephone call from a client that you took at an unplanned hour or the impromptu courthouse meeting you had with a client, Best noted. Any attorney that tries to reconstruct time days after the work is done is going to be inaccurate in how the time is being remembered, said George Apostolides, head of Arnstein & Lehr LLP s Chicago litigation practice, noting that such inaccuracies lead to lost revenue and raise ethical issues about the accuracy of billing. Further, not keeping regular track of billable hours will only lead to inefficiencies and wasted time, noted Rosemary Kupfert, a legal technology consultant with BQE Software, which makes several Web-based billing programs. For one, it often means that at the end of the month or quarter, you re scrambling to go through correspondence and email to try to re-create the time
spent on a case or a deal which in and of itself eats up time that you could otherwise spend working. And not calculating the hours billed as you go means you re less likely to spot places where you can be more efficient with your time or less likely to see if you re on track for your annual goals. See it and track it and know, Kupfert said. Last, remember that even minor inaccuracies that don t necessarily affect the cost of the bill can make an invoice seem unprofessional, which means that you the attorney billing the work should take the lead on inputting the time and details of the work rather than leaving it to someone else. Do it as you go and have the person actually doing the work enter their own time. They know who it is and how to spell names, noted Kupfert, who added that it is extremely important for billing invoices to look as professional as possible. Use Tech Shortcuts If your law firm offers some kind of billing software and experts say it should make sure to learn the various tools and take advantage of them to cut down on the time you spend billing. For example, many billing programs allow you to set up abbreviations that will then be expanded into full text. So for example, you can set it up so that when you type "TCC" it expands to telephone call with client or "CCWC" becomes cellphone call with client. Further, if the billing software has a desktop application for your computer, use it. If you take a phone call with a client, you can often put on the timer right as you pick up the call, and as you're communicating with the client you can type in a description about what the conversation is about, Kupfert noted. Getting into these kinds of habits will save time and headaches down the road. Once you save and close that entry, you re done with it, said Kupfert. Similarly, if you often travel for work, take advantage of any smartphone or tablet applications that your firm s billing software might offer. Make it so that you can virtually bill your time from wherever you go, Best said. Some will let you take a picture of receipts such as a parking receipt and immediately upload it to your company s billing system if it has that feature, Kupfert said.
Even if your firm is behind on these technological enhancements, there are often shortcuts and tricks you can find to help make your billing process more efficient. For example, Best suggested using the category labeling function in Outlook email to flag emails that can remind an attorney to bill the time related to the matter in that correspondence. Talk About Travel Early While it s sometimes hard to predict the level of engagement a case or deal may require, you often have a good sense of whether the matter will require significant traveling or not. And if it does, you should be talking to clients about the payment structure for that travel time before the traveling happens and before they get a bill, according to experts. I believe if an engagement is going to involve substantial travel time, there should be an upfront discussion about what the client is going to pay for, Apostolides said. Many clients don t want to pay full rates for attorneys that are traveling. Rather, they may prefer to negotiate paying half the rate or, frankly, nothing at all for the travel time. But it's better to have that discussion beforehand so that you don t get angry calls from irate clients demanding to know why they are paying for the five hours you spent waiting out an airplane delay, Apostolides noted. The best practice is to discuss the issue ahead of time and work out what the client will and won t pay for so there aren t tense negotiations happening after the fact and delaying the payment. Be Detailed But Not Too Detailed When it comes to typing out the description for a billing event, err on the side of more detail rather than less though within reason, experts said. Make sure your invoices are clear and understandable so the client knows exactly what you did and exactly what you re asking him or her to pay for, Best said. But there is such a thing as too much detail. You shouldn t overload billing descriptions with so much extraneous detail that clients can separate wheat from the chaff, Apostolides said. For example, if there was legal research done, you don t have to list every single document that was researched. But the billing description should explain why the research was taking place and the general scope of the research work. And the descriptions should be detailed enough that the client can essentially follow what went
on with the case during that time period, according to Apostolides. For example, if there was an office conference with a colleague, include a line of what event in the case prompted the meeting and what generally was agreed to or discussed in the meeting. Each month or each quarter, simply by reading the bill, the client should know what was done, why it was done, and [should] follow the narrative of the case, Apostolides said. Clients will be less likely to push back on a bill when there is that kind of detail and the hour or half hour of work can be well-justified. The more detail, the less chance they are going to cut the bill, Best said. --Editing by Jeremy Barker and Kelly Duncan.