No matter how much you help out your clients with your performance as an attorney, chances are they aren’t going to be thrilled about paying you and your firm for the time you spend on their legal matter. For this reason many lawyers find themselves mired in client disputes related to how they are tracking their time.
Attorneys who don’t effectively track their time are bound to lose money. This can happen by simply failing to bill clients for the time spent on a matter because it wasn’t accurately logged or even worse, it could be the result of the client disputing what work was actually performed due to inefficient legal time tracking.
Now, nobody likes to lose money, but losing money and taking a hit to your reputation when a client begins to question what work is actually being done or billed for can be absolutely disastrous. These type of client disputes go beyond creating leakage, they affect your firm’s ability to generate new business based on your reputation and could even result in ethics violations.
Here are some tips to help track your time more effectively and reduce the number of client disputes you and your firm have to handle.
Maintain The Original Source of Billing– It is incredibly important that your firm is able to remember and substantiate the original source of billing. In instances where your firm can’t remember or provide a paper trail identifying what you were billing for in the first place, you will be creating an environment in which your clients will lose trust in you. It is also important that you and your firm can produce substantiated evidence of the time and resources spent on a matter quickly, otherwise your client will become skeptical of what your are trying to bill them for.
Record Time Against All Tasks– Firm’s that record time against all of the tasks they perform can provide clients with detailed and concise invoices. When invoices clearly identify the time and resources spent on a matter there is no gray area to cause the client doubt. Without doubt, your clients will have nothing to dispute when it comes to what you are billing them for.
CosmoLex makes it easy for you and your firm to track the time spent on legal matters. By allowing you to capture time and expenses as they happen, you can record all of your billable legal time and costs immediately.
CosmoLex legal time tracking is free to try. Sign up for a free trial today and start reducing the number of client disputes associated with your firm’s legal time tracking.
