Excerpts from Everything I Needed To Know I Learned After Law School How to bill BILLING AND COLLECTING FEES Rule #1: It doesn’t matter how many hours you bill This goes entirely against the conventional wisdom of traditional law practice management. But the fact is that the only relevant statistic is how many dollars you collect, not how many hours you bill. What if you work for a firm which sets a quota for billable hours? Though many law firms do it, I think giving inexperienced lawyers a mandatory quota for billable hours is a horrible business practice. New lawyers haven’t learned their craft yet. A mandatory quota for billable hours encourages them to be inefficient with their time so that they can meet their quota, at precisely the time when they should be learning efficiency and good work habits. It encourages them to do “make work” to meet the quota, which translates directly into higher accounts receivable, much of which never gets paid. Many law firms compound this problem by then writing off the unreasonably high bill which results, and then blame the associate, rather than their own lousy business practices and priorities. It also illustrates the disconnect in our profession that there’s some relation between mere hours worked and professional performance. My suggestion is to concentrate on dollars collected rather than hours billed. Incidentally, I’ve rarely seen a young associate who is good at collection. This is a skill you should be learning since you may well be working for yourself at some time and will need to know how to do it. If you’re in this position, concentrate on collecting for the time you bill. Your boss will love it, because it is so rare. And if you are criticized about the number of hours you bill, you’ll have an answer because you can remind him that mere billable hours don’t go into his pocket, whereas collected ones do. How to bill Learn to record all your time working on a case. You may reduce it later, but if you don’t record it as you do it, how do you know how much time a particular task should have taken? You will probably be writing off a fair bit of time as you are learning. So be it. Practice doing great work, and on learning good work habits. You’ll be able to work more efficiently in the future. Use a good timekeeping program, keep it minimized on your computer, and start the timer when you take the phone call, dictate the letter, start the consultation, etc. Enter your time yourself rather than keeping a paper timesheet which you have to pay someone else to input into the billing system. Record your court time as soon as you walk back into the office. Never leave timesheets or time entries until the end of the day, or, God forbid, the end of the week, to fill out. You’ll never reconstruct all of the time. When breaking for lunch, add up the time you billed so far that day. If it isn’t as much as you think you put in, take a couple of minutes to think back over your morning and recall other things you did which you forgot to record. It’s a lot easier to pick up those phone calls and memos within a few hours than to try to do so at the end of the day. Also, before leaving the office for the day, take a moment to review the time you’ve recorded to see if there is something you forgot to enter. You won’t remember it tomorrow, or when you’re reviewing your bills before sending them out. Learn to be efficient with your time. The clients will love it, and you’ll have less to answer for later. We all think we’re selling hours to our clients. In fact, what they are buying is results. They’ll love it if they compare your bill to opposing counsel’s bill presented at the fee hearing and see that you did the same work in significantly less time. And, unlike other areas of the law, in family law these records routinely become available to the other side to scrutinize.
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